Tracy Lopes

Tracy Lopes is a postdoctoral fellow, specializing in African history and labour in the nineteenth century. Her research project focuses on the serviçais (contract workers) who were enslaved in the interior of Angola and then forcibly shipped to coffee and cocoa plantations on São Tomé and Príncipe in West Africa. In January 2022, Tracy received her PhD from York University, with a major in African history and a minor in African Diaspora and Legal History. She defended her doctoral dissertation “Punishing ‘Crime’: Jails and Confinement in Luanda, Angola, from 1836 to 1899” under the supervision of Dr. José C. Curto, a professor of African history at York University. This dissertation was nominated for the Faculty of Graduate Dissertation Prize and was made possible through founding from the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian in Portugal. Tracy has published her work in the Portuguese Studies Review, Punishment & Society, Revista Científica do ISCED-Huíla and HISTORIÆ. She has also taught numerous courses in African, global, and legal history.