APRIL 13, 2026 6:00 PM | SKYLIGHT ROOM GRADUATE CENTER CUNY, 365 FIFTH AVE, NEW YORK CITY.
RSVP: Migration as Punishment
This presentation examines penal reform and colonial expansion in the nineteenth-century Atlantic through two cases: deportations from prisons in Germany to Brazil and transportation from an English Reformatory to Natal (today’s South Africa). Drawing on archives from three continents, we uncover a transimperial grammar of displacement where administrators recast coercion as benevolence and exile as redemption. Reading these cases together reconsiders the relationship between migration, punishment, and empire-making, revealing the Atlantic as a (post-)carceral space where unfreedom haunted emancipation.
Victoria Bergbauer is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Emory University’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. A cultural and social historian of modern Europe and its global entanglements, her research explores how carceral regimes and their aftermaths have shaped modern concepts of freedom and state formation. Berbgbauer is currently working on her manuscript “Fragments of Freedom: Incarcerated Adolescents and their Afterlives in Nineteenth-Century Europe” and recently co-edited Carceral Architecture: From Within and Beyond the Prison Walls (Jovis, 2025).
Miqueias Mugge is a historian and academic research manager at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. His research focuses on the political economy of war, slavery, and empire-building in Latin America, with a particular emphasis on the Brazilian borderlands. He is the author, co-author, and editor of books exploring topics such as Brazilian militias, slavery, German immigration in 19th-century Brazil, and is currently finalizing the manuscript Building an Empire in the Age of Revolutions.
