About the Author

Alida C. Metcalf is Harris Masterson, Jr., Professor of History at Rice University and the author of Mapping an Atlantic World, circa 1500. A historian of Brazil and the Atlantic World, she authored Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil (1992; 2005), Go-betweens and the Colonization of Brazil (2005), and, with Eve M. Duffy, The Return of Hans Staden: A Go-between in the Atlantic World (2012). With Farès el-Dahdah she developed the digital humanities project imagineRio, which maps and illustrates the social and urban evolution of Rio de Janeiro from 1500 to the present. She is currently writing a history of water in Rio de Janeiro.