A Brazilian Intellectual Exiled in the Cold War: Emília Viotti Da Costa’s Trajectory in the United States (1968–1999)

Jônatas Oliveira Pantoja, Federal University of São Paulo

When the Brazilian military government issued Institutional Act Number Five in December 1968, it forced dozens of accomplished academics out of the country. Among those displaced was Emília Viotti da Costa (1928–2017), one of the most influential historians of slavery studies. After brief appointments at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and other U.S. institutions in the early 1970s, Costa secured a tenured position at Yale University. In Yale’s Department of History, she remained until her retirement in 1999 and was for many years the sole woman professor. She described her experience in U.S. academia as a period marked by personal struggles, given her status as a woman and an immigrant. Her trajectory raises the following question: how did the experience of political displacement — compounded by the gender-based structural exclusions within North American academia — transform the intellectual perspectives Costa brought to the study of Brazilian history, slavery, and race?

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 Presented in Session 7. Intellectual Histories and Theoretical Trajectories