José Lingna Nafafé is an Associate Professor of African and Atlantic History and was co-Director of Teaching for Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at the University of Bristol. Dr Lingna Nafafé’s academic interests embrace a number of inter-related areas, linked by the overarching themes of: the Black Atlantic abolitionist movement in the 17th Century; the Lusophone Atlantic African diaspora; seventeenth and eighteenth century African, Portuguese and Brazilian histories; slavery and wage-labour, 1792-1850; race, religion and ethnicity; Luso-African migrants’ culture and integration in the Northern (England) and Southern Europe (Portugal and Spain); ‘Europe in Africa’ and ‘Africa in Europe’; and the relationship between postcolonial theory and the Lusophone Atlantic.

In 2016, he was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to undertake archival research for the project “Freedom and Lusophone African Diaspora in the Atlantic”. Dr Lingna Nafafé is Co-Investigator for a recently awarded ERC Advance Grant project with Prof. Julia O’Connell Davidson.at the University of Bristol. We are carrying out research in 5 countries - UK, Spain, Brazil, France, Italy –on “Modern Marronage? The Pursuit and Practice of Freedom in the Contemporary World”. Dr Lingna Nafafe leads the project’s Brazil strand, conducting archival research on Quilombo dos Palmares (Alagoas), one of the earliest, largest and most successful Maroon communities in the seventeenth century, and on migrants’ settlement in the city of São Paulo, Brazil.

Dr Lingna Nafafé has previously been Programme Director of the MA in Black Humanities at the University of Bristol. He was nominated on ‘The BME Power List 2018 – Bristol’s 100 Most Influential BME People’ for having “advanced the history on resistance to enslavement through ground-breaking research which African Voices Forum shared at the Afrika Eye Film Festival in 2017.” Dr Lingna Nafafé’s second monograph Lourenço da Silva Mendonça, and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the 17th Century published with Cambridge University Press, 2022 (- part of the Studies on the African Diaspora series and featured in the Cambridge lists in Atlantic history, Latin American history, African history, and the history of slavery). It is the Award-Winning Book for the Best Scholarly Book Award from the African Studies Association of the UK, 2024. This innovative book provides substantial new evidence of the transnational and highly organised African abolitionist movement (including oppressed peoples of the Atlantic world such as, New Christians and Native Americans) in a crucial period in global history.

Dr Lingna Nafafé has shared research findings with the following:

• All-Party Parliamentary group on Guinea-Bissau, UK
• Vatican Radio in Rome, Italy
• USA State Department, USA
• Guinea-Bissau National Television
• Foreign and Commonwealth Office, UK
• Mosaic Producciones for France TV and RTP Portugal, Spain
• Conversation about countries of the South - Conversas ao Sul (Portuguese National Television) - RTP ÁFRICA, Portugal
• Newspaper, Jornal de Angola, Angola
• Newspaper, Al Jazeera
• Broccoli Productions – Podcast, UK
• Guinea-Bissau National Televison
• Portuguese Nacional Radio -  RDP ÁFRICA, Portugal 

He is currently writing a third monograph on: Beyond Wilberforce’s Experiment in Abolitionism: Yellow Fever Epidemic, Unfree Labour and the Market, 1792-1870

Teaching Undergraduates and Postgraduates

Units that I currently teach including undergraduate and postgraduate:

• HISP10015: Key Moments in Lusophone History and Culture
• HISP20099: Migration and Movement: Cultural Exchange in the Lusophone World, 19th to 20th
• HISP20089: Cultural Exchange in the Lusophone Atlantic, 16th-17th Centuries
• HISP30058: Culture and Politics in Luso-Africa and Brazil 18th-19th Centuries
• MODL30026: Pan-Africanism: Ideas and Archives
• MODLM0025: Theorizing Violence: Colonial Encounters and Anticolonial Reactions
• MODLM0002: Cultural Encounters
• MODLM0044: Black Humanities II 2020
• MODLM0021: Research Skills

Research supervision

I welcome proposals in any areas of early modern Lusophone Africa and connections with Brazil, in most areas of Black Atlantic abolitionist movement history; Lusophone Atlantic African diaspora; Freedom; Marronage (Quilombo dos Palmares); Law and the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic Slavery; African perspectives on the Atlantic slavery; Black Atlantic Christian confraternities; race; religion and ethnicity, and I would also supervise thesis on modern Luso-African migrants in Europe, and postcolonial theories.

External positions

Advisory board of the Cadernos de Estudos Africanos, the most prestigious Portuguese peer-review academic journal on African Studies and Council member of African Studies Association in the UK (ASAUK).

External Examiner, Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University of Sheffield, Queen Mary University, University of Nottingham

1 Sep 2019 → July 2022

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