Prof. Dr. Ana Lucia Araujo

During her residency at the BCDSS, Professor Araujo will work on her book project Global Slavery: A Visual History (under contract with Bloomsbury). This visual history of the slave trades and slavery draws on hundreds of artworks, artifacts, and other visual images housed in museums, libraries, and archives across the world, regardless of their institutional artistic value. Comparing and confronting these visual sources to written primary sources such as travel accounts, maps, slave fugitive ads, journals of slave ship captains and surgeons, slave narratives, newspaper articles, correspondences, and pamphlets, Global Slavery: A Visual History tells the history of slavery and the slave trades in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The book argues that visual representations of human bondage can connect different times and spaces. The book also deploys a provisional genealogy of slavery images. I show that from the early modern era to the twentieth century, visual representations of slavery have incorporated persisting themes visible in depictions of human bondage during antiquity, including slave markets and instruments of physical punishment such as chains, collars, and shackles. By writing this long history across four continents through visual representations, she hopes to offer new ways to approach the similarities and differences among slavery and several slave trades in different periods and spaces. Through this visual history, she will also illuminate some specific features of the institution of slavery that emerged earlier before the massive enslavement of Black Africans provoked by the rise of the Atlantic slave trade. Hopefully, the book will also encourage scholars, teachers, and students to embrace visual representations and artworks as complex sources to study the past and to better understand slavery as one of the oldest human evils. Professor Araujo’s project also calls for a dialogue between the approach used by art historians, who examine themes, styles, symbols, formal elements, and the contexts or artistic creation, and the methods used by historians who develop arguments based on the examination and interpretation of written, oral, and visual primary sources to explain the human past.

• 2024. Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery in the Americas. University of Chicago Press.
• 2024. The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism. Cambridge University Press. 
• 2023. Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History. Bloomsbury. Revised and expanded edition.
• 2021. Museums and Atlantic Slavery. Routledge.
• 2020. Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past. Bloomsbury.