Kirsten Schultz, Ph.D.

Professor
Department of History

I am a historian of Latin America and the Iberian Atlantic. My research focuses on Brazil and the Portuguese empire from 1500 to the 1820s and investigates how people understood, affirmed, and contested the exercise of political authority. My book Tropical Versailles (2001) examines the ways in which the transfer of the Portuguese royal court to Rio de Janeiro in 1808 transformed ideas of monarchy and empire. My more recent book, From Conquest to Colony (2023), examines debates about wealth, difference, and governance and how they informed understandings of Brazil’s status within the eighteenth-century Portuguese empire. At Seton Hall, I teach a broad range of courses on Latin America’s history.