Amy Chazkel, ‘Toward a History of Rights in the City at Night: Making and Breaking the Nightly Curfew in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 62 (1), 2020

Amy Chazkel’s work uses temporality as a lens to explore the historical experience of Rio’s residents in the nineteenth century. Night criminalized activities for certain inhabitants--slaves or people who could be taken for slaves, women, foreigners--that were perfectly legal during the daytime. Her creative approach gave a literary flair to the piece, and the committee were particularly impressed with the way her tools could be used by other scholars.

She refers to her sources, police notebooks, as “glimpses through a tiny keyhole at nocturnal public culture before the era of Rio’s famed nightlife, before there was supposed to be any.” Scholars teasing out what existed where it wasn’t “supposed to” is a significant way of reading “across the archival grain”, and Chazkel shows how we can extrapolate a broader understanding of the field. In her case, this is an urban environment evolving alongside, and through, the development of modern policing, transport and technology.