Bate-Papo Lecture Series: Slaves' Savings in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro

A lecture by Keila Grinberg, associate professor of history at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and a 2011-12 visiting scholar at the University of Michigan.

How did enslaved individuals participate in the monetary economy of slave societies? Where did they invest their savings? Focusing on the city of Rio de Janeiro, Keila Grinberg looks at savings account booklets and other documents to analyze the investments made by slaves in the last half of the nineteenth century.

Keila Grinberg is a Visiting Scholar at the University of Michigan during 2011-2012. She is an associate professor of history at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO). Her major areas of research are nineteenth-century Brazil, slavery in the Atlantic world, legal history, and history education. Her books include Liberata: a lei da ambiguidade (RJ, Relume Dumará, 1994); O Fiador dos Brasileiros: escravidão, cidadania e direito civil no tempo de Antonio Pereira Rebouças (RJ, Civilização Brasileira, 2002); and Slavery, Freedom and the Law in the Americas (with Sue Peabody) (Boston / NY, Bedford Books, 2007). She also writes two monthly columns ("Em Tempo" and "Máquina do Tempo" ) for the online journal, Ciencia Hoje, and she has published a number of books for the general public on historical topics.

The "Bate Papo" provides informal gatherings of students, scholars, and invited guests to discuss issues of broad contemporary interest. Conversations are primarily in Portuguese, but accessible to beginning Portuguese students.