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Department of History

Dr Camillia Cowling

Camillia

 

  

Office: 3.78 (Cluster B), 3rd floor, Faculty of Arts Building

Email: c.cowling@warwick.ac.uk

I am on study leave during the academic year 2024-5.

 

Academic Profile

  • 2018- Associate Professor of Latin American History, University of Warwick
  • 2013-18: Assistant Professor of Latin American History, University of Warwick
  • 2012-2013: Lecturer in Latin American History, School of History, Classics & Archaeology, University of Edinburgh
  • 2009-2012: Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship, held at School of History, Classics & Archaeology, University of Edinburgh (2011-12) and Department of Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American Studies, University of Nottingham (2009-11)
  • 2007-2009: Leverhulme Trust Study Abroad Studentship (Rio de Janeiro and Havana)
  • 2003-2007: Ph.D., History. Institute for the Study of Slavery, Department of History, University of Nottingham
  • 2000-2001: M.A., Area Studies (Latin America): Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London
  • 1996-2000: B.A. (Hons.), History & Spanish, Oxford University

 
Research

 
My research has focused on slavery and abolition in the Americas and Atlantic World, and specifically Brazil and Cuba. My first book, Conceiving Freedom: Women of Colour, Gender and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), examines the gendered gradual abolition process which occurred simultaneously in Brazil and Cuba, the Americas’ last slaveholding territories. The book reveals the fundamental role of enslaved and freed women in each abolition process, particularly focusing on women's use of the emancipation laws. The study situates women's actions within a broader examination of the operation of gender within Atlantic abolitionist discourses and practices. Translations have been published with Editora da UNICAMP (Campinas, Brazil) and Editorial de Ciencias Sociales (Havana).

I have co-edited (with Maria Helena Machado, Diana Paton, and Emily West) two journal special editions entitled Mothering Slaves: Motherhood, Childlessness and the Care of Children in Atlantic Slave Societies, which appeared in Slavery & Abolition and Women's History Review in 2017 and as a single volume with Routledge in 2020.

My second monograph, Bound Journeys, Freedom Places: Slavery, Movement, Gender, and Place in Nineteenth-Century Cuba, is in progress, with support from a British Academy/ Leverhulme Small Research Grant (SRG\170990) and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2021-3). Bound Journeys explores how a new slave society was forged in Cuba's nineteenth century through a bitter, transformational set of struggles over human movement across the island's fast-changing physical spaces during the height of the expanded plantation regime. Based on detailed archive research across three countries, it excavates how enslavers and colonial officials forged a newly gendered and racialised politics of forced movement. Enslaved women and men, meanwhile, deployed varied and surprising forms of mobility, built the struggle against forced movement into a radical spatial politics of their own, and sought to make "place" on their own terms.

Articles and chapters related to this project have appeared in Slavery & Abolition (2023), Atlantic Studies (2021), and Orden político y gobierno de esclavos: Cuba en la época de la segunda esclavitud y de su legado, ed. José Antonio Piqueras (2016).

 
Teaching

PhD Supervision

I am keen to supervise PhD projects on nineteenth-century Latin America, especially Cuba, Brazil - or both. I'm particularly interested to supervise projects relating to slavery and emancipation, gender, law, space and mobilities.

PhD supervisions (completed):

  • Dr. Liana-Beatrice Valerio, "Scripts of Confidence and Supplication: Fear as the Personal and Political Among the Elite Male Slaveholders of South Carolina and Cuba, 1820 – 1850" (completed 2020, viva passed with no corrections), co-supervised with Prof. Tim Lockley, University of Warwick

  • Dr Nicolás Gómez Baeza, "Managers from the British World: Imperial Trajectories and Labour Regimes in the Sheep-Farming Industry of Southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, 1858-1964" (completed 2024, viva passed with no corrections), co-supervised with Prof. Robert Fletcher (University of Missouri)

Publications:


Book

  • Conceiving Freedom: Women of Colour, Gender and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). Winner, Roberto Reis Prize (Brazilian Studies Association); finalist, Frederick Douglass Prize (Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition). http://uncpress.unc.edu/books/12179.html

  • Translated as: Concebendo a liberdade. Mulheres de cor, gênero e a abolição da escravidão nas cidades de Havana e Rio de Janeiro, translated by Patrícia Ramos Geremias & Clemente Penna (Editora da UNICAMP, Campinas, SP, Brazil, 2018).
  • Translated as: Concebir la libertad. Mujeres de color, género y la abolición de la esclavitud en La Habana y Río de Janeiro, translated by Natalia Labouskaya (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2019).

Edited collections

  • "Mothering Slaves: Motherhood, Childlessness and the Care of Children in Atlantic Slave Societies," eds. Camillia Cowling, Maria Helena Machado, Diana Paton, and Emily West (special edition of Slavery & Abolition, 38:2 (2017)).

  • "Mothering Slaves: Motherhood, Childlessness and the Care of Children in Atlantic Slave Societies," eds. Camillia Cowling, Maria Helena Machado, Diana Paton, and Emily West (special edition of Women’s History Review, 27:6 (2017)).

  • Motherhood, Childlessness and the Care of Children in Atlantic Slave Societies, eds. Camillia Cowling, Maria Helena Machado, Diana Paton, and Emily West (Routledge, 2020). [compilation, with a new introduction, of the Slavery & Abolition and Women's History Review special editions, above.]

Articles and book chapters

  • "'The People of All Kinds Who Walk Along the Lines': The Precarious Mobilities of Unfree Workers on Cuba's Early Railroads," Slavery & Abolition, 44 (2023): 456-477 (part of the special edition, "Captive Mobilities: Movement, Slavery and Knowledge Production in the Iberian Atlantic World," eds. Bethan Fisk and José Lingna Nafafé)
  • "Mulheres escravizadas, ventres livres: Havana e o Rio de Janeiro, 1870-1888," in Ventres livres? Gênero, maternidade e legislação, eds. Maria Helena Machado, Luciana da Cruz Brito, Iamara da Silva Viana, and Flávio dos Santos Gomes (São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2021).
  • "Teresa Mina's Journeys: 'Slave-Moving', Mobility and Gender in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Cuba," Atlantic Studies, 18:1 (February 2021): 7-30.
  • “Gendered Geographies: Motherhood, Slavery, Law and Space in Nineteenth-Century Cuba.” Women’s History Review, 27:6 (June 2017): 939-53.
  • “Esclavitud, espacio físico y movilidad en Cuba, s. XIX,” in Orden político y gobierno de esclavos: Cuba en la época de la segunda esclavitud y de su legado, ed. José Antonio Piqueras (Valencia, Spain: Centro Francisco Tomás y Valiente UNED Alzira-Valencia, Fundación Instituto de Historia Social, 2016), 205-228
  • "Género y los sentidos de la libertad: mujeres esclavizadas y libertas en Cuba y Brasil, 1870-1888," in Emergiendo del silencio: mujeres negras en la Historia de Cuba, ed. Oilda Hevia (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2016)
  • "‘Como escrava e como mãe’: mulheres e abolição em Havana e no Rio de Janeiro," in Tornando-se Livre: Agentes históricos e lutas sociais no processo de abolição, eds. Maria Helena Machado and Celso Castilho (São Paulo: EDUSP, 2015), 143-66
  • “Bancando a liberdade, popularizando a política: abolicionismo e fundos locais de emancipação na década de 1880 no Brasil,” co-authored with Celso Castilho, translated by Marília Bueno de Araújo Ariza from the original “Funding Freedom, Popularizing Politics” (2010). Afro-Ásia (Salvador da Bahia, Brazil), 47 (2013): 161-97
  • "As a Slave Woman and as a Mother: Women and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro," Caribbean special issue (ed. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara), Social History, 26:3 (August 2011), 294-311
  • "Funding Freedom, Popularizing Politics: Abolitionism and Local Emancipation Funds in 1880s Brazil," co-authored with Celso Castilho, Luso-Brazilian Review, 47:1 (Spring 2010): 89-120 (winner of the Conference on Latin American History Vanderwood Prize, 2011)
  • . "Debating Womanhood, Defining Freedom: The Abolition of Slavery in Rio de Janeiro," Gender & History, 22:2 (August 2010): 284-301
  • "Hard Work with the Mare Magnum of the Past: Nineteenth-Century Cuban History and the Miscelánea de Expedientes Collection," co-authored with Jorge L. Giovannetti, Cuban Studies/ Estudios Cubanos, 39 (2008): 60-84
  • "Hacia la libertad: mujeres, género y familia en la abolición de la esclavitud en Cuba, 1870-1886," in La dimensión familiar en Cuba: pasado y presente, vol. 2, ed. Ana Vera Estrada (Havana: Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo de la Cultura Cubana Juan Marinello, 2007), 165-83
  • "Negociando a liberdade: mulheres de cor e a transição para o trabalho livre em Cuba e no Brasil, 1870-1888," (translated by Mariana Dantas) in eds. Douglas Cole Libby and Júnia Ferreira Furtado, Trabalho livre, trabalho escravo: Brasil e Europa, séculos XVIII e XIX (São Paulo: Coleção Olhares, Annablume, 2006), 153-75
  • "Negotiating Freedom: Women of Colour and the Transition to Free Labour in Cuba, 1870-1886," Slavery and Abolition, 26:3 (December 2005): 373-87
  • "Género y libertad: la transición hacia el trabajo libre en Cuba, 1870-1886," (translated by Silvia Cogollos), Memoria y sociedad (Bogotá, Colombia), 7:15 (November 2003): 81-7

Other contributions

  • Preface, Aisnara Perera Díaz and María de los Angeles Meriño, La cesión de patronato: una estrategia familiar en la emancipación de los esclavos en Cuba, 1870-1880 (San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba: Editorial Unicornio, 2009), ix-x
History writing for schools and non-academic audiences
  • “O fundo de emancipação ‘Livro de Ouro’ e as mulheres escravizadas: gênero, abolição e os significados da liberdade na Corte, anos 1880,” in Mulheres Negras no Brasil Escravista e do Pós-Emancipação, eds. Giovana Xavier, Juliana Barreto Farias and Flávio dos Santos Gomes, (São Paulo: Selo Negro Editora, 2012), 214-227. Translated as Black Women of Brazil in Slavery and Post-Emancipation (Diasporic Africa Press, 2017).

Media

"As escravas sabiam usar as leis em seu favor," interview with Globo national newspaper, Brazil, 8 October 2015, p. 2:

http://oglobo.globo.com/cultura/camillia-cowling-pesquisadora-as-escravas-sabiam-usar-as-leis-em-seu-favor-17716920