Ana Lucia Araujo

Araujo was born and raised in Brazil. She earned her undergraduate degree in Fine Arts from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, Brazil (1995), and a MA in History from Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Porto Alegre, Brazil (1998). She moved to Canada in 1999 and obtained a PhD in Art History from Université Laval (Québec City, Canada) in 2004. Her supervisor was David Karel (1944-2007).[2] In 2007 she also earned in cotutelle a PhD in History (Université Laval) and a doctorate in Social and Historical Anthropology from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris, France).[3] Her supervisors were historian Bogumil Jewsiewicki and anthropologist Jean-Paul Colleyn.[4]

Araujo received a postdoctoral fellowship from FQRSC (Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture) in 2008, for the project titled: "Right to Image: Restitution of Cultural Heritage and Construction of the Memory of the Heirs of Slavery" but moved to Washington DC to take a tenure-track position of Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Howard University. She was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor in 2011, and became full professor in 2014.[3] Araujo is editor of the book series Slavery: Past and Present by Cambria Press.[5] She lectures throughout the United States, Canada, Brazil, Portugal, South Africa, France, United Kingdom, Netherlands, and Argentina, in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Araujo's work explores the public memory of slavery in the Atlantic world.[6] She authored many books and articles on history and memory of slavery, including Public Memory of Slavery: Victims and Perpetrators in the Atlantic World (2010), Shadows of the Slave Past: Memory, Slavery, and Heritage (2014) and Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History (2017).[7] Public Memory of Slavery, her first book in English studies the historical connections between Bahia in Brazil and the Kingdom of Dahomey in modern Benin, during the era of the Atlantic slave trade and how in these two areas social actors are engaging in remembering and commemorating the slave past to forge particular identities through the construction of monuments, memorials, and museums.[8] In her second book she continued to focus on the processes of memorialization of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in the Americas, with a particular emphasis on Brazil and the United States.[9] Her book Reparations for Slavery is a comprehensive history of the demands of financial and material reparations for slavery and the slave trade in the Atlantic world.[10][11]

Araujo's first book published in French, Romantisme tropical: l'aventure d'un peintre français au Brésil, examines how French travelogues, especially the travel account of French artist François-Auguste Biard (1799-1882), Deux années au Brésil, contributed to construct a particular image of Brazil in Europe.[12] In 2015, the University of New Mexico Press published a different version of this book Brazil Through French Eyes: A Nineteenth-Century Artist in the Tropics.

A public scholar, Araujo's work has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Le Monde, Radio Canada, Radio France, O Público, and other media outlets around the world. Her op-eds have also appeared in the Washington Post, History News Network, Newsweek, and the Intercept Brasil.

Recorded lectures

• Memory of Slavery and the Problem of Reparations in Brazil in "Brazil Initiative Lecture Series," Watson Institute, Brown University, Providence, RI, February 7, 2018.
• Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History. Book presentation at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC, February 15.
• Sites of Disembarkation and the Public Memory of the Atlantic Slave Trade in " International conference The States of Memory of Slavery: International Comparative Perspectives. La mémoire de l'esclavage dans tous ses états. Perspectives internationales comparées," École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France, October 22–23, 2015 (video).
• Le corps de l’esclave: mémoires et patrimonies blessés (in French) at the International seminar «Éprouver le Brésil. Mémoires, marges et subversions», organized by CÉLAT (Université Laval) and the Harriet Tubman Institute (York University), held at Université Laval during the Black History Month, on February 26, 2015 (video).