Eduarda Lira de Araujo is a PhD candidate in African and African American Studies, with a primary field in History. She holds a bachelor's degree in Africana Studies from Brown University, and a master's degree in History from Harvard University, where she is also a graduate fellow at the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center.

Her doctoral dissertation builds a political and intellectual history of African and Afro-Brazilian healers and diviners between the 1850s and the 1920s in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Eduarda’s research demonstrates that through their spiritual practice, healers and diviners in Rio mobilized South Atlantic intellectual repertoires to engage in a variety of political projects. These political endeavors went from helping enslaved workers run away, to providing abortifacient herbs to free, freed, and enslaved women, and poisoning violent planters, positioning these ritualists within a larger context of Afro-diasporic spiritual practices and systems of knowledge.

Her research has been supported by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Graduate School of Arts and Science's Merit Fellowship, and the American Historical Association. In the Spring 2024 semester, she was awarded with a History Prize Instructorship, teaching a seminar titled "Rituals of Rebellion: Race, Religion and Resistance in the African Diaspora."