Dr. Isadora Mota

Biography

Isadora Moura Mota is a historian specializing in slavery, Brazil, and the Atlantic world. Her research primarily focuses on modern Brazilian history, comparative slavery, abolitionism, literacy, and the African diaspora in Latin America. Mota’s book, Freedom’s Horizon: Black Abolitionism in Nineteenth-Century Brazil, investigates the role of Afro-Brazilians in shaping the historical narrative of abolition within the Atlantic world. The study examines the historical development of geopolitical imagination among the enslaved, highlighting the escalation of black activism in relation to British efforts to suppress the slave trade, the U.S. Civil War, and the Triple Alliance War (1864-1870). Mota argues that abolitionism was a grassroots movement, rooted in the social and conceptual lives of enslaved individuals, recaptives, freedpeople, and quilombolas, asserting Brazil's significance in the Age of Emancipation. She holds a Bachelor’s degree from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, a Master’s degree from the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), and a PhD from Brown University (2017). She joined the faculty at Princeton in 2019 after serving as an assistant professor of History at the University of Miami, with her research supported by various prestigious organizations including the Social Sciences Research Council and Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Abolition, and Resistance.

Research Interests