Simón Bolívar Professor 2025/2026: João José Reis

Simón Bolívar Professor 2025 - 2026: João José Reis

João José Reis holds a PhD from the University of Minnesota (1982) and is Professor of History at the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador, Brazil. He has been a visiting professor at several institutions including the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Princeton University, and Harvard University. He has also been a Fellow at leading research centres such as the University of London, National Humanities Center, Gilder Lehrman Center, and the Institute of Advanced Study (Princeton). 

An Honorary Foreign Member of the American Historical Association, Professor Reis has received numerous awards and distinctions, including the Jabuti Book Award from the Brazilian Publishers’ Association, the Casa de las Américas Prize (Cuba), and the Machado de Assis Prize from the Brazilian Academy of Letters. Four of his books have been published in English: Slave Rebellion in Brazil (Johns Hopkins, 1993); Death Is a Festival (University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Divining Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, 2015); and The Story of Rufino (Oxford, 2021), co-authored with Flávio Gomes and Marcus Carvalho.

He is currently at work on several projects, including studies of slave revolts and biographies of African enslaved and freed people. His most recent monograph, Ganhadores: A greve negra de 1857 na Bahia (Companhia das Letras, 2019), investigates African labour resistance to taxation in nineteenth-century Bahia.

• On Monday, October 13, João José Reis will present the Simón Bolívar Seminar at 5:15 p.m. in the Lecture Theatre at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, CB2 1TJ
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