Victoria Broadus

Biography

Victoria Broadus is a historian of Latin America with a focus on modern Brazil and Afro-Latin America. Her current book project focuses on “vissungo” verses from the interior diamond-mining region of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Those verses were recorded in the 1930s and ’40s still primarily in African language; they provide a window onto the African and maroon culture of that region, slavery and post-emancipation in Minas and Brazil, and ultimately onto the relationship between Africans’ and Afro-descendants’ struggle to survive and their cultural forms in the Americas.

Broadus teaches courses on early and modern Latin America at Oberlin, along with lecture courses on focused aspects of Latin American history, such as the History of Rio de Janeiro, and seminar courses on topics in Latin American social and cultural history. She is a proud daughter, niece, and sister of Obies.