Assistant professor - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil
Janvier à mars 2013
Henrique Espada Lima is Professor at the Department of History at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (Brazil), where he teaches, supervises and conducts research on Historiography and Contemporary Labour History. During 2011-2012, he was Research Fellow at the International Research Center for "Work and Human Life Cycle in Global History" at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Germany).
His first academic training was in Psychology. He has a Master degree in Literature (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, 1993) and a Doctorate in History (Universidade de Campinas, 1999). His areas of activity and research are historiography and micro-history, as well as labour history focusing on lives of ex-slave workers in nineteenth-century Brazil.
African Trajectories in Southern Brazil: life cycles, generational transits, and survival strategies between slavery and freedom (XIXe century)
The research proposed here will focus on the reconstruction of trajectories of individuals, families and groups of freed African slave workers and their descendants in a southern Brazilian locality - the Island of Santa Catarina. Through an intense research on serial (notarial and parochial) records, as well as civil and criminal records and postmortem inventories made by the State's judicial authorities, we will focus on the numerous strategies and arrangements made by those men and women in order to free themselves from slavery as well as to assign meaning and content to the "freedom" they achieved. The period covered by the research goes from c.1830 to 1900, focusing on the long term process of disaggregation of the Brazilian slave system, as well as the first decade after emancipation (occurred in 1888). Finally, this research will discuss through a micro-historical approach - a wide frame of questions focused on the blurred boundaries between "slavery" and "freedom", inspired by an important and growing scholarship in the field of labour history in a global and transnational perspective.