CEAO was the first Brazilian academic centre devoted to African and Asian studies (est. 1959) and remains one of the leading national institutions to articulate these fields with studies around race relations and durable inequalities in the Global South, bringing together research, teaching, and public outreach. Strategically located in downtown Salvador (the city with the largest number of black people outside of Africa and one of the cradles of Afro-Brazilian culture), CEAO has developed long-running collaborations with grassroots movements interested in antiracism, gender equality, fighting religious intolerance, promoting citizenship rights and a more inclusive, democratic society, as well as an opening up of Brazilian Academia to dialogues with academic and non-academic institutions, movements, and intellectuals in Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. UFBA is the leading university in Northeastern Brazil, with a strong research orientation and high-ranked undergraduate and graduate courses in all areas of knowledge.
CEAO hosts a graduate program in Ethnic and African Studies and is also connected to graduate programs in History, Anthropology, Sociology, Museum Studies, and Literature. It offers a vibrant ambience for visiting scholars willing to connect with diverse researchers, students, and social activists from different parts of Brazil, Latin America, and Portuguese-speaking African countries. It is the place of choice in Bahia for academic venues about race relations, Africa, Afro-Latin America, the Caribbean, the Islamic world, and Asia, as well as local grassroots antiracist movements and Afro-Brazilian religious community gatherings and public events such as seminars, book launches, and recitals.
We welcome fellows interested in a wide range of topics related to society, arts, culture, and politics in the Global South, especially involving Asia-Africa or Asia-Latin America dialogues and connections, as well as comparative perspectives or case studies focusing on durable inequalities and struggles around the making and remaking of difference and social identity categories in terms of race, ethnicity, class, gender, religious affiliation, nation, etc. We expect visiting scholars to try and engage with scholarship and theorization from the Global South (and in languages other than English) and to be collaborative, flexible, genuinely curious, and open-minded.