About
Image: a Rose wheel window at the Church of Saint Francis, Juazeiro do Norte, Brazil.
I am a candidate in the Anthropology and History program. Before coming to Ann Arbor, I lived in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where I did my M.A. in Social Anthropology at the National Museum. I am currently a 2025-2026 ACLS Mellon Foundation Dissertation Innovation Fellow.
My main research asks: how has capitalism in the last century wrought changes to human and non-human landscapes? Starting from the story of a small dam in the hinterlands of the Brazilian Northeast, my dissertation will focus on how shifting valorization patterns in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries have formed this territory, long seen as remote and untethered from the rest of the world. Against that view, I hope to propose a history of the hinterland's growing integration in the global economy in the last hundred years. Infrastructure - roads, reservoirs, ports and energy cables - in this history becomes another plane for seeing how these longue durée shifts (urbanization, industrialization, and economic stagnation) have played out in the last century. I hope these analytics can give us a clearer sense of how the global demiurge we call "the economy" governs our lives and the places where we live - and hopefully, how it might be undone in a connected and densely populated planet.
