Viola Franziska Müller is a social historian specialized in slavery and labor coercion in the Americas. She received her PhD in 2020 from Leiden University with a dissertation on fugitive slaves in cities of the nineteenth-century US South. Before coming to Utrecht as a lecturer in Economic and Social History, Viola was a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence.

She holds a BA in Latin American Studies and Economics from University of Cologne (2012) and a MA in History of Migration and Global Interdependence from Leiden University (cum laude, 2015). Viola also studied at University of Barcelona (2009-2010) and was a short-term fellow at Brown University (2019).

Viola’s research interests include themes like slavery, labor, race, illegality, mobility, resistance, and urban history. She has taught at universities in Colombia, Germany, and the Netherlands.

As a Management Committee delegate for the Netherlands and coordinator of the Think Tank, Viola is part of the EU COST Action “Worlds of Related Coercions in WorK” (WORCK), an academic network of labor historians.