Amy Chazkel

Amy Chazkel is Associate Professor of History and holds the Bernard Hirschhorn chair of Urban Studies at Columbia University. A specialist in modern Brazil, she teaches courses in various fields that include Latin American history, urban history, law and society in Latin America, the history of crime and policing, historical methodology, slavery and post-abolition societies, and housing justice. She is the author of Laws of Chance: Brazil’s Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Modern Public Life in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2011), a study of petty crime, urban culture, and the historical roots of the informal sector in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Brazil. Other publications include articles on the history of penal institutions and illicit gambling in modern Brazil, the privatization of common property in global perspective, the urban legal history of Rio’s nineteenth-century curfew, a collection of essays on police museums in Latin America, and a co-edited anthology of primary sources about the history of Rio de Janeiro. Most recently, she is co-editor of a special issue of Radical History Review that explores historical cases of places and times without police throughout the world. She has held faculty fellowships and visiting scholar positions at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard, the Center for Brazilian Studies at Columbia, and the Center for the Humanities, the Center for Place, Culture and Politics, the Committee on Globalization and Social Change and the Advanced Research Collaborative at the CUNY Graduate Center, and the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia. She is completing Rio de Janeiro and the Politics of Nightfall (forthcoming with Oxford University Press), a book about the history of the urban nighttime focusing on nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro.