Margarita Rosa is a Ph. D candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature and a scholar of women and slavery in the Western Hemisphere. Her dissertation, titled “The Enslaved Womb: Enslaved Women, Roman Law, and Reproduction in Brazil,” traces the history of legislation concerning enslaved women’s biological reproduction, beginning with Roman legislation and ending with the 1871 Free-Womb Law in Brazil. Rosa’s work examines how nineteenth-century scholars in Brazil used or disposed of Roman legislation in arguments for or against hereditary slavery. Rosa traces the naturalization of the claim that “the child of an enslaved woman is also born a slave,” and provides theoretical tools for studying the inheritance of slavery through long durée accounts of the western archive.  

Her interests include enslaved women and reproduction, slave rebellions, enslaved women in prisons, and black women writers in the western literary tradition. Margarita Rosa’s historical training is in Latin American History and African American History.

Adviser: Dr. Susana Draper

Committee: Drs. Jennifer Morgan, Tera Hunter, Rachel Price, and Nicole Legnani

Courses:

Co-Professor/preceptor: AAS 220: African American Intellectual History, fall 2018, 2 sections
Professor: ENG 212: World Literature, Garden State Youth Correctional Facility, fall 2017

Professor: ENG 111: English Composition, Garden State Youth Correctional Facility, spring 2017

Preceptor: ENG 227: American Identities, Princeton University, spring 2017, 2 sections

A Selection of Guest Lectures:

“The Bluest Eye: Toni Morrison and Memory as Literary Form”
Course: African American Intellectual History, Princeton U., fall 2018

“What enslaves a so-called slave: the first century of Spanish debates on slavery”
Course: Slavery and Emancipation in Latin America and the Caribbean, Princeton U., fall 2018

“Oscar Wao: Dominican masculinity, womanhood, and Intergenerational violence in Díaz”
Course: Identity in the Hispanic World, Princeton U., fall 2017

“Slave Revolts in the Americas,” Public Lecture, Penn Sapelo, U. of Pennsylvania, spring 2018.

“Slave Revolts and the Prison Industrial Complex,” Center DC, spring 2019

Academic Awards and Fellowships:

2017-2018 Center for African American Studies Dissertation Research Grant, Princeton University

2018, Eleanor Green Fellowship for Studies in American and Latin American Literature, Princeton University

2017, Program in Latin American Studies Graduate Research Grant, Princeton University

2017, Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies Language Grant

2015-2016, President’s Prize, Princeton University

2015, Center for Human Values Award, Princeton University

Archival Visits:

2019, Torre de Tombos, Lisbon, Portugal

2019, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon, Portugal

2019, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisbon, Portugal

2019, Arquivo Publico do Estado de Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

2019, Arquivo Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

2018, Archivo General de la Nación, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

2017, 2018, Arquivo Publico do Estado da Bahia, Salvador, Brazil

2016, Biblioteca Nacional de Guatemala, Guatemala City, Guatemala