Dr Camillia Cowling

Associate Professor, Department of History Director of Second Year Studies Director, Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean StudiesLink opens in a new window Office 3.78 (Cluster B), 3rd floor, Faculty of Arts Building Office hours: Mon 2-3 online and Wed 11-12 (drop-in, FAB 3.78) Email: c.cowling@warwick.ac.uk

Academic career

I joined Warwick's Department of History in 2013. I have served as Director of Studies for Year 2 since 2022 and Director of the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies since 2025.

I studied at Oxford (BA in Spanish and History); Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London (MA in Latin American Studies); Centre for Caribbean Studies (London Metropolitan University); and Department of History, University of Nottingham (PhD, History). Before joining the department, I held a permanent lectureship at Edinburgh (School of History, Classics and Archaeology), a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (held at Nottingham, Dept of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies and then at Edinburgh), and a Leverhulme Study Abroad Studentship (post-doctoral).

I'm a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Research

I am a social and cultural historian of Latin America and the Hispanic Caribbean. My research has focused on slavery and its abolition, gender, motherhood, law, place, and human movement in nineteenth-century Brazil, Cuba, and the wider Atlantic world.

Conceiving Freedom: Women of Colour, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro:

My first book, Conceiving Freedom: Women of Colour, Gender and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro (University of North Carolina Press, 2013), examined 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, and explores the high stakes and tensions involved in defining freedom for former enslaved women amid both racism and misogyny. This book won the Roberto Reis book prize for best book on Brazil in English (Brazilian Studies Association) and was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Prize (Gilder Lehrman Center, Yale). Translations have been published with Editora da UNICAMP (Campinas, Brazil, 2018) and Editorial de Ciencias Sociales (Havana, 2019).

Articles related to this project appeared in journals including Slavery & Abolition and Gender & History. I've published several chapters on this topic in Brazil (for example: Tornando-se Livre: Agentes históricos e lutas sociais no processo de abolição, eds. Maria Helena P.T. Machado and Celso Thomas Castilho (São Paulo: EDUSP, 2015); Ventres livres? Gênero, maternidade e legislação, eds. Maria Helena P. T. Machado, Luciana da Cruz Brito, Iamara da Silva Viana, and Flávio dos Santos Gomes (Editora UNESP, São Paulo, 2021) and in Cuba (such as “Esclavas y libertas y los sentidos de la libertad: Cuba y Brasil, 1870-1888,” in Emergiendo del silencio: mujeres negras en la Historia de Cuba, ed. Daisy Rubiera Castillo and Oilda Hevia (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2016).

Abolitionism and Popular Politics in Brazil:

I've also written more widely on the politics of abolitionism in Brazil. My article, co-authored with Celso T. Castilho, "Funding Freedom, Popularising Politics: Abolitionism and Local Emancipation Funds in 1880s Brazil" (Luso-Brazilian Review, 47:1 (Spring 2010): 89-120) won the Vanderwood Prize for Best Article in Latin American History (Conference on Latin American History) and was re-published in translation with Afro-Asia (Salvador da Bahia, 2021).

Exploring Cuban Archive Collections:

I've written on the complexities and joys of research with Cuban archive collections in: “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, ed. Louis A. Perez Jr. (University of Pittsburgh Press), 39 (2008): 60-84.

Mothering Slaves: Motherhood, Childlessness, and the Care of Children in Atlantic Slave Societies:

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.

Bound Journeys, Freedom Places: Slavery, Movement, Gender, and Place in Nineteenth-Century Cuba:

My second monograph, Bound Journeys, Freedom Places: Slavery, Movement, Gender, and Place in Nineteenth-Century Cuba, is under advance contract with the University of North Carolina Press. 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 many years of archive research in several 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.

Research for this project received support from a British Academy/ Leverhulme Small Research Grant and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2021-3).

Articles and chapters related to this work have appeared in Slavery & Abolition (2023), Atlantic Studies (2021), Women's History Review (2017) and Orden político y gobierno de esclavos: Cuba en la época de la segunda esclavitud y de su legado, ed. José Antonio Piqueras (2016).

Paths of Enslavement, Routes to Freedom: Slavery and Mobility in the Iberian Atlantic World:

I organised this 2-day event at Warwick in 2023, which included academic presentations on the topic of slavery and mobility and a roundtable discussion of anti-racist pedagogy approaches to the teaching of the history of slavery with UK and international schools as well as university educators.

Teaching

At Warwick I have taught on the following modules:

• H115 Latin America: Themes and Problems (I convene and teachon this UG first-year co-taught module)
• AM220 "The Country of the Future?" Introduction to the History of Modern Brazil (undergraduate second-year option module, ran 2013-2016)
• Space, Place and Movement in Atlantic Slave Societies: Brazil, Cuba and West Africa, 1791-1888 (undergraduate final-year 30-CATS module)
• Contributions to: HI153 (UG; Making of the Modern World); HI997 (PG; Themes in Global and Comparative History); HI995 (PG; Themes and Approaches to the Historical Study of Empire).

Teaching Leadership

I have served as Director of Undergraduate Studies (Year 2) since 2022, and have previously served as Joint Degrees Coordinator. My teaching leadership has been recognised through my Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy.  

PhD Supervision

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

PhDs supervised:

• 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), 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 202), co-supervised with Prof. Robert Fletcher (University of Missouri)

International Visiting PhDs supervised:

• Dr. Carla Andrés Bauzá. “Mujeres africanas y afrodescendientes en la Guerra de los Diez Años en Cuba, 1868–1878: esclavitud, género e insurgencia,” visiting supervisee (EUTOPIA graduate mobility programme), 2023-4 (Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona; home supervisors Prof. Albert Garcia Balañà and Prof. Martín Rodrigo Alharilla), completed March 2025

• Thompson Clímaco, Visiting PhD student, CAPES postdoctoral mobility grant, Jan-Jul 2026, from Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro (home supervisor: Prof. Álvaro Pereira Nascimento): "Between Morality and Conflict; Race and Class Tensions in the South of Rio de Janeiro, 1871-1920."

Publications

Books

• Bound Journeys, Freedom Places: Slavery, Movement, Gender, and Place in Nineteenth-Century Cuba. Under advance contract, University of North Carolina Press, anticipated 2027-8

• 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
• 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

Impact and Engagement

I've spoken and written about my work to various wider audiences, including an interview to Brazil's largest national newspaper, O Globo; ("As escravas sabiam usar as leis em seu favor," 8 October 2015, p. 2); The Women's Network Annual Conference (Keynote lecture: “Bound Journeys, Freedom Places: Enslaved Women’s Stories from Nineteenth-Century Cuba),” the Kenneth Kirkwood Memorial Day, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, 9 March 2024; Cadbury Sixth Form College, Birmingham, Sept 2024; and publications aimed at wider readerships such as: “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).

Service to the Profession

Editorial Board member, Journal of Latin American Studies

Editorial Board member, Slavery & Abolition

Advisory Board“Gender & Slavery” book series, University of Georgia Press (eds. Daina Ramey Berry and Jennifer Morgan)