Ana Lucia Araujo

Araujo's work explores the public memory of slavery in the Atlantic world. She authored many books and articles on history and memory of slavery, including Public Memory of Slavery: Victims and Perpetrators in the Atlantic World (2010), Shadows of the Slave Past: Memory, Slavery, and Heritage (2014) and Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History (2017). Public Memory of Slavery, her first book in English studies the historical connections between Bahia in Brazil and the Kingdom of Dahomey in modern Benin, during the era of the Atlantic slave trade and how in these two areas social actors are engaging in remembering and commemorating the slave past to forge particular identities through the construction of monuments, memorials, and museums. In her second book she continued to focus on the processes of memorialization of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in the Americas, with a particular emphasis on Brazil and the United States. Her book Reparations for Slavery is a comprehensive history of the demands of financial and material reparations for slavery and the slave trade in the Atlantic world.

Araujo received a postdoctoral fellowship from FQRSC (Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture) in 2008, for the project titled: "Right to Image: Restitution of Cultural Heritage and Construction of the Memory of the Heirs of Slavery" but moved to Washington DC to take a tenure-track position of Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Howard University. She was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor in 2011, and became full professor in 2014. Araujo is editor of the book series Slavery: Past and Present by Cambria Press. She lectures throughout the United States, Canada, Brazil, Portugal, South Africa, France, United Kingdom, Netherlands, and Argentina, in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Araujo was born and raised in Brazil. She earned her undergraduate degree in Fine Arts from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, Brazil (1995), and a MA in History from Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Porto Alegre, Brazil (1998). She moved to Canada in 1999 and obtained a PhD in Art History from Université Laval (Québec City, Canada) in 2004. Her supervisor was David Karel (1944-2007). In 2007 she also earned in cotutelle a PhD in History (Université Laval) and a doctorate in Social and Historical Anthropology from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris, France). Her supervisors were historian Bogumil Jewsiewicki and anthropologist Jean-Paul Colleyn.

Ana Lucia Araujo (born in 1971) is a historian, author and professor of History at Howard University. She is a member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Slave Route Project. Her scholarship focuses on the transnational history, public memory, visual culture, and heritage of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade.

Araujo's first book published in French, Romantisme tropical: l'aventure d'un peintre français au Brésil, examines how French travelogues, especially the travel account of French artist François-Auguste Biard (1799-1882), Deux années au Brésil, contributed to construct a particular image of Brazil in Europe. In 2015, the University of New Mexico Press published a different version of this book Brazil Through French Eyes: A Nineteenth-Century Artist in the Tropics.