Thiago Nascimento Krause

Thiago Nascimento Krause

Thiago Krause specializes in the history of Brazil and the Atlantic World. Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, he completed his Ph.D. in History at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro in 2015. Before coming to Detroit, he was an assistant professor at Unirio and UERJ, two urban public research universities in many respects similar to Wayne. 

He is particularly interested in the ways Brazilian history illuminates and is illuminated by other contexts. He is also interested in Digital Humanities, particularly Handwritten Text Recognition – the use of AI to decipher old manuscripts.

He has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the John Carter Brown Library, Fundación Carolina (Spain), Fundação do Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, CNPq and CAPES (Brazil).

Research interest(s)/area of expertise

• Slavery and Emancipation in the Atlantic World
• History of Brazil
• Global History (16th to 19th centuries)

Research

His first book focused on the making of Brazilian colonial elites during the Dutch wars of the seventeenth century. Since then, he has worked on multiple topics, such as the making of the Brazilian state in the nineteenth century and its role in the perpetuation of social hierarchies, especially slavery.

He is currently collaborating with Christopher Ebert (Brooklyn College/City University of New York) on a book on the Global History of Salvador da Bahia from 1640 to 1750, when it was the main slave-trading port of the Americas and one of the major exporters of commodities produced by enslaved Africans. The book traces the global circulation of enslaved-produced commodities and the trans-imperial business of buying and selling human beings to emphasize the integrated nature of the Atlantic World, too often understood within self-contained imperial borders. The labor of enslaved Africans was central at every step of the way, from the sugar and tobacco fields to the loading and repairing of ships in one of the busiest ports of the Americas. This work draws on research in over 80 archives spread across a dozen countries and nearly as many languages.

Education

• Ph.D. in History, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 2015
• M.A. in History, Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2010
• B.A. in History, Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2007

Awards and grants

• Short-term fellowship, two months, John Carter Brown Library, 2024-2025
• Membership in the School of Historical Studies – Institute of Advanced Study (Princeton), 2022-2023
• Donald L. Saunders long-term residential research fellowship, six months, John Carter Brown Library, 2022-2023 – declined
• Movilidad de profesorado universidades del grupo Tordesillas, Fundación Carolina, 2021-2022
• Jovem Cientista do Nosso Estado, Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, 2021-2024
• Auxílio à Pesquisa, Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, 2019-2022
• Auxílio-Instalação, Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, 2018-2019
• National Council for Science and Technology (CNPq), Brazil; Doctoral Scholarship, 2011-2015
• Department of Improvement for Superior Education Personnel (CAPES), Brazil; Scholarship for a six-month stay at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 2013-2014

News mentions

• “Brazil's President Faces Backlash For Posting Salacious Carnival Video”, NPR, March 7, 2019
• “Brazil presidential election: Political violence sweeps across country as electorate prepares for divisive vote”, Independent, October 21, 2018
• “In Brazil, voters' far-right fears carry weight of history”, The Christian Science Monitor, October 2, 2018

Selected publications

• Em Busca da Honra: a remuneração dos serviços da guerra holandesa e os hábitos das Ordens Militares (Bahia e Pernambuco, 1641-1683) (São Paulo: Annablume, 2012), 290pp
• With Rodrigo Goyena Soares, Império em Disputa: Coroa, Oligarquia e Povo na Formação do Estado brasileiro, 1823-1871 (Rio de Janeiro: Editora da Fundação Getulio Vargas, 2022), 400pp
• Finalist in the Prêmio Abeu (Prize of the Brazilian Association of University Presses), Humanities
• “Military Orders and Local Power: Elites, City Councils and Taxation in Seventeenth-Century Brazil”. Portuguese Studies Review 21:2 (forthcoming)
• With Christopher Ebert, “The Dutch Republic’s Brazil Trade after 1654”, Pursuing Empire: Brazilians, the Dutch and the Portuguese in Brazil and the South Atlantic, c. 1620 – c. 1660, edited by Cátia Antunes (Leiden: Brill, 2022), 168-192
•  With Leonardo Marques, “The Longue Durée of Brazil-Africa Relations (c. 1450–1960)”, Brazil-Africa Relations in the 21st Century: From Surge to Downturn and Beyond, edited by Mathias de Alencastro and Adriana Schor (Gewebestrasse: Springer, 2021), 9-23
• With Ida Altman, “Europeans, Indians and Africans in the Making of Colonial Societies”. The Iberian World: 1450-1820, edited by Fernando Bouza, Pedro Cardim and Antonio Feros (New York: Routledge, 2020), 415-430
• With João Fragoso, “Colonial elites: planters and land nobility in 17th and 18th century Brazil”. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, edited by Guillermo Palacios (general editor) and Ronald Raminelli (editor for Colonial Brazilian history). New York: Oxford University Press, 2020
•  With Pedro Cardim, “Colonial Governance in the Atlantic World”. Atlantic History – Oxford Bibliographies, edited by Trevor Burnard (2018, updated in 2019)
• Review of ˜From Conquest to Colony: Empire, Wealth, and Difference in Eighteenth-Century Brazil˜ (Colonial Latin American Review, 33:2, 2024, 273-274)

Courses taught by Thiago Nascimento Krause

Fall Term 2024 (current)

• AFS3250 - Politics and Culture in Anglophone Caribbean