Katherine Cosby

Advisor: Dr. Alex Borucki and Dr. Tiffany Willoughby-Herard
Dissertation Committee: Jessica Millward

First Field: Latin America
Second Field: African Diaspora

Dissertation Title: “Flowers Grew Out of the Asphalt: Black Women's Territories in São Paulo, 1871-1930”

Research Abstract
In my dissertation project, I interrogate black women’s geographies and the strategies of state actors and the elite to maintain their visions of order and progress during the First Republic (1889-1930) in São Paulo, Brazil.

My dissertation project addresses how the treatment of Black women in the afterlife of slavery, under the guise of whitening ideologies, contributed to the formations of regional identity and Black women’s geographies in the city of São Paulo. The lives and presence of Black women after abolition often go unrecognized as part of a larger omission of slavery and Black histories in public discourse and the brick-and-mortar archive. Relying on medicolegal municipal incident reports, “Flowers Grew Out of the Asphalt” centers Black women, their geographies, and spatial histories to push against traditional narratives and imaginings of São Paulo as a principally white, Europeanized city.

Publication

• “The Interprovincial Slave Trade from Rio de Janeiro, 1809-1833: An Analysis of the Brazilian Institute of Applied Economic Research Database,” with Daniel B. Domingues da Silva, History Compass (2020).

• 2020 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship
• 2018 Fulbright-Hays DDRA (Brazil)