Amy Chazkel

Historian

Amy Chazkel is a historian of Brazil with broad interests in the urban humanities, law and society, crime and justice, policing, slavery, abolition, and post-abolition societies in Latin America and the Atlantic world. In her research and writing, she has principally explored the urban and legal history of post-colonial Brazil. She is the author of Laws of Chance: Brazil’s Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Modern Public Life in Brazil and is co-editor of The Rio Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Her latest book, forthcoming with Oxford University Press, explores the social, cultural, and legal history of the urban nighttime, focusing on Rio de Janeiro during the long 19th century. She co-edited "The Rest is Political: Radical Histories of Repose," the January 2026 issue of the Radical History Review. She holds a position on the History faculty at Columbia University as Bernard Hirshhorn Associate Professor of Urban Studies.