Patricia Acerbi is a historian of Latin America who specializes in Brazil. Her work focuses on slavery and freedom, urban informality, and the institutions that regulated the transition from slavery to freedom in the era of abolition. She is author of the award-winning book, Street Occupations: Urban Vending in Rio de Janeiro, 1850-1925 (University of Texas Press, 2017), and explores the urban citizenship of street vendors in the award-winning article “A Long Poem of Walking” published by the Journal of Urban History. She currently explores enslaved and free labor resulting from the commercial dynamics at the Valongo slave market in Rio de Janeiro.
