André Luís Bezerra Ferreira

André Luís Bezerra Ferreira is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, where he works within the Global Legal History on the Ground Research Group. His research focuses on the intersection of indigenous knowledge systems and colonial legal frameworks in Portuguese Amazonia during the 17th and 18th centuries.

• Current Position: Postdoctoral researcher, Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory
• Education: PhD in Social History of the Amazon from Federal University of Pará (2023)

Dr. Ferreira's research interests center on how indigenous peoples in Amazonia contributed to the historical construction of normative regimes, particularly through legal categories of captivity, slavery, and freedom. His work examines how indigenous knowledge systems shaped colonial legal practices, challenging traditional narratives of passive reception of imperial law. He investigates how memory, kinship, and customary practices operated as powerful tools of legal argumentation within colonial courts such as the Juntas das Missões.

His recent publications reveal a consistent focus on indigenous agency within colonial legal systems, with particular attention to indigenous women's legal strategies, the construction of racial categories, and the translation of indigenous knowledge into colonial legal frameworks. The research demonstrates how indigenous actors actively participated in shaping legal intelligibility through oral traditions, relational structures, and ritual procedures.

• International Young Investigator Award (Portugal) - 2019
• Best Thesis Award; 1st Place - 2014

Dr. Ferreira has held research fellowships at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague, and the University of Seville. His current project, “Indigenous knowledge: making captivity, slavery and freedom intelligible in Portuguese Amazonia (17th–18th centuries),” examines how indigenous memory functioned as a normative element in colonial legal contexts. His work contributes significantly to global legal history by foregrounding native autonomy in the production and translation of normative knowledge, offering critical insights into contemporary indigenous struggles for territory, rights, and justice.