Olívia M. Gomes da Cunha

Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

Olívia M. Gomes da Cunha is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Graduate Program in Social Anthropology, Nacional Museum, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, her dissertation on vagrancy and identification science in Rio de Janeiro in the early 20th century was awarded and published by Arquivo Nacional in 2002. She was Post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University (1999-2000), John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow (2002) and Visiting-Professor at New York University (2006-2007). Currently, she is a Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Visiting Professor at the University of Amsterdam (2017), and was appointed as a Tinker Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago (2018). She has published articles, book chapters, and edited volumes on post emancipation and social movements, archives, anthropology and history in Brazil, Cuba and the U.S.; and Cottica Ndyuka Maroon society in Suriname. Her current research, initiated in 2009, is about art, creativity, and other cultural and political transformations among the Ndyuka in Eastern Suriname. On her more recent publications, are a book on ethnography, archives, and artifacts of knowledge in Cuba, Brazil and the U.S. (under contract, Brill Publishers), and an edited volume entitled Maroon Cosmopolitics: personhood, creativity and incorporation (forthcoming. Leiden: Brill).