Perfil

Laura de Mello e Souza was born in São Paulo, Brazil, and did all her university training at the History Department of the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences of the University of São Paulo (USP), where she joined as a lecturer in Modern History in 1983, becoming a full professor of this subject in 1999. She was a Tinker Visiting Professor at the University of Texas – Austin, a professor at the Guimarães Rosa Chair at the Autonomous University of Mexico and a guest lecturer at conferences and seminars at various European, North American and Latin American universities. She retired from the University of São Paulo in 2014 to take up the Chair of Brazilian History at Sorbonne Université (formerly Paris IV), which she held until 2022.

He has received several awards, including the Casa-Grande e Senzala Prize (Joaquim Nabuco Foundation); the Jabuti Prize (3 times), the Prize of the Brazilian Academy of Letters; the International Prize of History 2024, awarded by the International Committee of Historical Sciences (ICHS).

His areas of interest include the colonial history of Brazil (with an emphasis on the captaincy of Minas Gerais in the 18th century); relations between the different parts of the Portuguese empire; popular religiosity; colonial conflict (16th-18th centuries).

Main books: Desclassificados do Ouro (1982); O Diabo e a terra de Santa Cruz (1986); Inferno Atlântico (1993); O sol e a sombra (2006); Cláudio Manuel da Costa – o letrado dividido (2011); O jardim das Hespérides (2022).