Welcome Vitor Franco

Please join us in welcoming Vitor Franco, a Ph.D. candidate in history at the Universidade Federal Fluminenese, who will be working with Dr. Hendrik Kraay this semester. Vitor is a recipient of a scholarship from the Emerging Leaders of the Americas Program, a short-term exchange program under Global Affairs Canada’s International Scholarships Program that provides students from post-secondary institutions located in Latin America and the Caribbean with opportunities for study or research at Canadian post-secondary institutions.

Vitor will be working on his doctoral thesis, which focuses on slavery in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, specifically, the enslaved people owned by the Benedictine Order of the Catholic Church, known as “Escravos da Religião” (Slaves of Religion). The Church provided ideological support for African slavery and held its own captives. Between 1800 and 1871, the Benedictine Order had almost two thousand enslaved people on its Rio de Janeiro sugar plantations, the largest concentration of enslaved people owned by the Catholic Church in Brazil.