Teaching
Charlevoix, Quebec, 2023
Personal archive
In my classrooms, I prioritize respect, curiosity, and community-building to foster spaces of collaborative learning and empathetic dialogue. Aligned with my commitment to public engagement, my teaching philosophy emphasizes experiential learning as a means to extend education beyond the classroom and create lasting impacts on students’ lives.
Latin American History
Latin American societies are shaped by layered cultures, political ideologies, and material realities. Although molded to the singularities of the region's diverse geography, these layers have taken form through long and complex historical processes marked by the legacies of colonialism, nation-state formation, and international development.
My courses on Latin American history trace the movements of human communities, non-human actors, ideas, and commodities that have shaped the region from the Late Pleistocene to the current migratory crisis. Framed as a journey across time and space, I guide students through Latin America’s geographic diversity while encouraging them to question the historical roots of concepts we often take for granted today when talking about the region, such as modernity, development, topicality, and inequality.
Family portrait. Chichico Alkmim, Brazil, 1910.
Instituto Moreira Salles, Sao Paulo.
Global Environmental History
Colonnade en ruines. Hubert Robert, 18th century.
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Environmental history explores how human societies and natural environments have shaped one another over time. From the food we eat to the energy that sustains our lives and the ideas that ground our national identities, our daily existence is the outcome of historical interactions between societies and environments across both global and local scales.
I invite students to connect their own lives to these global environmental networks by questioning the historical roots of their consumption habits, material conditions, and collective identities. The goal is to guide them to create themselves a critical and informed position to frame their action in the frame of today’s climate crisis. In the classroom, we journey through diverse landscapes around the world, engaging with key themes in environmental history through readings, films, podcasts, and other media.
Afro-Latin America
African and Afro-descendant peoples have played vital roles in shaping societies and landscapes across Latin America’s diasporic geography. Yet their contributions have often been sidelined by racial discourses rooted in colonial power and reinforced by post-independence societies. Narrating the Black history of the region is essential not only to honor the legacy of Afro-descendant communities, but also to confront the structural inequalities that persist today and to imagine futures grounded in diversity and justice.
My course on Afro-Latin America offers an alternative chronology of the region’s history by centering the struggles, achievements, and cultural creativity of Black communities. In the process, we explore themes ranging from political mobilizations for freedom, to the safeguarding of cultural traditions through religion, music, and agriculture, to the development of vernacular ecologies.
Musa Paradisiaca. Rosana Paulino, 2018.
A costura da memória. Pinacoteca de Sao Paulo.