Manoel Rendeiro Neto

Manoel Rendeiro Neto joins the FAS as Assistant Professor of History. In 2025-26, Rendeiro Neto was a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in the Department of History and Affiliate Fellow at the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University. He works on the symbiotic regimes of African slavery and Indigenous free labor that transformed the management of tropical forests, plantation complexes, and botanical gardens across the Atlantic World. His book manuscript, Imperial Tides, Runaway Rivers: Cultivating Knowledge, Labor, and Sovereignty in the Atlantic Amazon (1750-1850), examines how the disputed extraction and (re)production of highly skilled Afro-Indigenous intellectual and manual labor on the rainforest shaped imperial state-building, autonomous territorialities, and scientific knowledge.

Besides working on his first book, Rendeiro Neto has been developing articles related to waterscape engineering interventions and slavery in 18th century French Guiana; and Indigenous Amazonian women’s role as commercial agents on inter-village trade of domestic produce during Portuguese colonization. His research has been supported by the Conference on Latin American History, the Dumbarton Oaks in conjunction with the Mellon Foundation, the Huntington Library, the John Carter Brown Library, the Luso-American Development Foundation, University of California Humanities Research Institute, among others.

Rendeiro Neto holds a BA and a teaching degree in History from the University of Brasília, and an MA and PhD in Latin American History from the University of California, Davis, with a specialization in African Diaspora Studies. Born and raised in the Brazilian Amazon, Rendeiro Neto is committed to research projects on traditional Afro-Indigenous Amazonian communities and their histories to foster the development of growing interdisciplinary studies about the largest rainforest in the world from early modern times to present day challenges.