Marina de Mello e Souza is an associate professor in the Department of History at the College of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, working in the Undergraduate program and in the Graduate Program in Social History. She is a free lecturer in African History at USP, a PhD in Social History from the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) and has a master's degree in History of Culture from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-RJ). She is the author of articles published in academic journals and the dissemination of historical knowledge, and in the books Paraty, the City and the Holidays, 1994 and 2008; Black Kings in Slave Brazil. History of the Coronation Party of Rei Congo, 2001 and 2006; Africa and African Brazil, 2006, 2008 and 2013, and Beyond the Visible. Power, Catholicism and Trade in Congo and Angola (16th and 17th centuries), 2018 and 2021. Current director of the Center for African Studies at FFLCH-USP, she is a member of the Brazil Africa Research Support Center at USP, of the Consultative Council of the Portuguese Language Museum, in São Paulo, and develops research on the Congo in the 18th and 19th centuries with a CNPq productivity grant.