Nabuco Scholars

Junia Ferreira Furtado is professor of modern history at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil. She has also been a visiting scholar at Ecole des Hautes Etudes em Sciences Sociales in 2008 and a visiting professor in the history department, at Princeton University during spring 2001. Professor Furtado obtained her Ph.D. in social history from the Universidade de São Paulo. She has published several books and articles about colonial Brazil and slavery including Chica da Silva: a Brazilian slave of the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, 2009 (Brazilian edition was Honnor,  Casa de las Américas 2004). During her stance at Stanford from April 15 through June 15, 2012, professor Furtado will be conducting research on the religious and political mission to Dahomey of  the freed mulatto priests, Cipriano Pires Sardinha  and Vicente Ferreira Pires (1797). She hopes to shed light on their freed mixed-blood male descendants and how they integrated into the local society. Professor Ferreira also aims at analyzing how they interpreted their African cultural religious heritage within the context of their embracing of the Catholic church, which was dominant in the Portuguese world.