Adriana ChiraAssociate Professor

Adriana Chira, Associate Professor of Atlantic World History (Ph.D. University of Michigan, M.A. Cornell University, B.A. Cambridge University, UK). Atlantic history; Cuba in world history; race; slavery and the law; land tenure and property; post-emancipation.

I am a historian of the Atlantic World, with research interests in histories of race and law in slaving and post-emancipation Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Spanish Equatorial Guinea. My first book, Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba’s Plantation (Cambridge University Press, Afro-Latin America Series, 2022), focuses on enslaved and free Afro-descendants’ efforts to own landed property and to attain free legal status in Cuba during the nineteenth century. The book traces the political implications of these processes arguing for a history of emancipation that pays attention to local community-building and that goes beyond elite abolitionism or intra-Caribbean mobilities.

Patchwork Freedoms received the James A Rawley Prize in Atlantic World History from the American Historical Association, the Peter Gonville Stein Prize for best book in non-US legal history from the American Society for Legal History, and the Elsa Goveia Prize for excellence in Caribbean history from the Association of Caribbean Historians. It has also received honorable mentions from the Latin American Studies Association (Nineteenth Century Section) and from the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Section of the Southern Historical Association. Articles based on this project have appeared in the Law and History Review and in the American Historical Review. The articles have received, among others, the Vanderwood Prize from the Conference on Latin American History and the prize for best article in any field authored by a woman historian from the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians.

I am currently at work on several book projects. The first one, a collaboration, is a cultural history of value and labor markets in eighteenth-century Cuba and Colombia. A second book explores ownership by possession in early twentieth-century rural Cuba, paying close attention to both popular and juridical approaches to landed property and its “social functions.” A third project addresses development policies in post-extractive contexts in rural Puerto Rico after the nationalization of the sugar industry in the 1970s.

My research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and by residential fellowships at Yale University (at the Agrarian Studies Center) and at Harvard University (with the Weatherhead Initiative in Global History).

My courses are in close conversation with my research. I teach thematic global history courses (e.g., Human Trafficking in World History; Property and Social Justice in World History; Globalization: the Atlantic World), as well as place-focused courses (e.g., on the Caribbean, Cuba, and Puerto Rico).