The Fire at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro

One of the late-breaking sessions at this year’s AHA Annual Meeting dealt with the devasting fire that engulfed Brazil’s Museu Nacional in September 2018. The session was titled “Archives Burning: The Fire at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro and Beyond.” We spoke with three of the participants just after the panel concluded: Natalia Sobrevilla Perea, Seth Garfield, and Mariza de Carvalho Soares. Natalia Sobrevilla Perea is Professor of Latin American History at University of Kent. She is the author of the book The Caudillo of the Andes: Andrés de Santa Cruz, which was published in English by Cambridge University Press in 2011 and in Spanish by the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos in 2015. Seth Garfield is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of the 2001 book Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil: State Policy, Frontier Expansion, and the Xavante Indians, 1937–1988, and the 2013 In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region, both published Duke University Press. Mariza de Carvalho Soares recently retired from her position as Associate Professor of History at the Universidade Federal Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro and has more recently served as the curator of the African collection at the Museu Nacional. She is the author of People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro, published in English in 2011 by Duke University Press. The panel also included Kirsten Weld from Harvard University and the session chair, Bianca Premo from Florida International University.