Adriana Chira is a Fellow at the Agrarian Studies Program, Yale University. She is an assistant professor of Atlantic World history, with an affiliation in African Studies, at Emory University. She received her PhD from the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan in 2016. Her research focuses on race, slavery, emancipation, and the law in the Iberian Atlantic. As an agrarian studies fellow, she will be completing her first monograph–Free of Color: Slavery and Popular Ideologies of Race in Cuba, 1760s-1860s—which traces late nineteenth-century Cuban ideologies of “racial confraternity” to diffuse popular taxonomies of race in eastern Cuba. Drawing on research with notarial records, judicial cases, urban and rural property registers, sacramental records, and official correspondence, the manuscript examines how ordinary women, men, and families of various degrees of African descent conceived of color-based distinctions through practices of rural and urban property ownership and kinship. The project reflects more broadly on the impact of Caribbean borderlands and of the popular sectors on centers of power and on political ideologies that have traditionally been associated with intellectuals and prominent activists.
The core of the Agrarian Studies Program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. The 2017-2018 theme is “Hinterlands, Frontiers, Cities, and States: Transactions and Identities.”
Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium.
For more information, visit the Agrarian Studies Colloquium webpage.