Kari Zimmerman studies the intersections among labor, race and gender in nineteenth-century Brazil. She received her Ph.D. in Latin American History from Stanford, an M.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles and a B.A. in Comparative U.S. and Latin American History from the University of San Francisco. Her dissertation, “Women of Independent Means: Female Entrepreneurs and Property Owners in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1869-1904,” examines the variety of economic opportunities for women in late nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro as well as the institutional structures regulating female market participation. Considering actual business practice along with Brazil’s commercial law, civil code and prescriptive literature on proper female behavior, the project weighs the importance of legal mandate over social norm. Interested in the relationship between workingwomen and the urban environment across the Americas, Kari’s work also focuses on issues such as comparative slavery, immigration and the family.
While at Stanford, Kari was a dissertation fellow at the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research and pursued research through the Courts Records Project, the Terrain of History International Workshop and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. She also taught in the Stanford History Department and Program in Feminist Studies.