Amy Chazkel
Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center

Amy Chazkel is an Associate Professor of History at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. As a historian of Latin America with a specialization in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Brazil, her work has focused on the intersection of the study of the law and the humanities. She is the author of Laws of Chance: Brazil’s Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Urban Public Life in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2011), winner of the New England Council of Latin American Studies Best Book Prize, co-winner of the J. Willard Hurst Prize of the Law and Society Association, and recipient of Honorable Mention for the Best Book Prize of the Brazil Section of the Latin American Studies Association. A Portuguese translation of Laws of Chance, entitled Leis da sorte, was published in Brazil in 2014 (Editora da Unicamp). She is co-editor of The Rio Reader: History, Culture, Politics, a co-edited anthology of primary sources on the history of Rio de Janeiro, which will be published by Duke University Press in 2015. Other publications include articles on the history of penal institutions, criminal law, and illicit gambling in modern Brazil and co-edited issues of the Radical History Review that explore the privatization of common property in global perspective and Haitian history. 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 Institute for Latin American Studies/ Center for Brazilian Studies at Columbia, and the Center for the Humanities and the Center for Place, Culture and Politics and the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the CUNY Graduate Center. In 2013, she was a Visiting Professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) in Brazil. She currently serves as Co-Chair of the Radical History Review Editorial Collective. Her projects in progress include research for a book that explores the social, cultural, and legal history of nighttime in nineteenth-century urban Brazil.