Amanda is a Ph.D. student in environmental history. Prior to Princeton, she earned a B.A. and M.A. in History from the University of Brasília, where she studied the dissolution of enslaved families through mortgage arrangements, credit relations, and colonial household economies in eighteenth-century Brazil, primarily in Vila de Curitiba and its environs in the Brazilian South. During her Master's, she researched private business letters and the conceptual tools available for mercantile negotiation, the Catholic economic understanding of the world, and the moral expectations of market behavior between partners and relatives. She also studied the social role of the notary's office and the construction of authority by the local mercantile elite through this crown device, with scholarships from the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico, CNPq (Brazil).

Her current research interests are in rural and indigenous history, focusing on people's relationship with land and animals in colonial Brazil in the 17th and 18th centuries in terms of how ideas about the natural world shaped the organization of production, labor regimes, and the colonial social fabric — with a particular focus on interspecies relations, with wild and domesticated animals.

She is also an enthusiast of DH methods, social network analysis, and GIS and has worked with database construction and management in several projects at UnB and UniCentro (Guarapuava – Paraná, Brazil). She is currently working on a multidimensional relational database with 130 years of population records (1680 – 1810) from southern Brazil, the former province of São Paulo, to generate representative material of this colonial agrarian space.