May 6-7, 2018 Conference

On May 6-7, 2018, the Brazilian Ministry of Education and Yale University  co-hosted a conference around Brazilian activities and perspectives on Brazil in the United States. This event was used to plan and organize for a larger Brazilianists conference to be held on November 30-December 1, 2018.

Program  |  Speakers and Guests  |  Sponsors

Program

Speakers and Guests

Fernando de Mello Barreto
Consul General of Brazil in Hartford

Ambassador Barreto's diplomatic service to Brazil has included stints as ambassador to Australia and to Russia and as delegate to the World Trade Organization, and he is now Consul General of Brazil in Hartford. In Brazil, Ambassador Barreto was a member of the Minister’s cabinet, serving in roles such as chief of staff and economic advisor.  His career spans 20 years working around the globe in Ecuador, the USA, Canada, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. Early in his career as an international lawyer in private practice, he also did some teaching. He has also written four books on Brazilian diplomatic history.

 Ambassador Barreto is also pursuing a S.J.D. (Scientiae Juridicae Doctor or Doctor of the Science of Law) degree, a research-based doctorate, from University of Connecticut School of Law. In his research, he is examining and comparing anti-corruption initiatives in Brazil, the U.S., Denmark and Russia. 

Sidney Chalhoub
Professor of History, African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Sidney Chalhoub is Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is also a faculty affiliate of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. He taught at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil, for thirty years before coming to Harvard in the fall of 2015. His research and writing focus mainly on the social history of Brazil in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with emphasis on the history of slavery, race, public health, and the literature of Machado de Assis, a writer of African descent widely regarded as the most important Brazilian novelist of all times.

He published five individual books, three of them on the social history of Rio de Janeiro: Trabalho, lar e botequim (1986), on working-class culture in the early twentieth century; Visões da liberdade (1990), on the last decades of slavery in the city; and Cidade febril (1996), on tenements and epidemics in the second half of the nineteenth century. At Harvard, he teaches courses on slavery, race, literature, and theories and methodologies of history, besides a lecture course on the History of Brazil, from Independence (1822) to the Present.

Amy Chazkel
Associate Professor of History
Queens College, City University of New York

Amy Chazkel is a historian of Latin America who specializes in post-colonial Brazil. She is the author of Laws of Chance: Brazil’s Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Urban Public Life in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2011), winner of the New England Council of Latin American Studies Best Book Prize, co-winner of the J. Willard Hurst Prize of the Law and Society Association, and recipient of Honorable Mention for the Best Book Prize of the Brazil Section of the Latin American Studies Association. Other publications include articles on the history of penal institutions, criminal law, illicit gambling, and the urban nighttime in modern Brazil and co-edited issues of the Radical History Review that explore the privatization of common property in global perspective and Haitian history.

Amy serves on the Radical History Review Editorial Collective, and for the 2016-17 academic year will be a Futures Initiative Fellow at the Graduate Center. Her projects in progress include research for a book that explores the social, cultural, and legal history of nighttime in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. 

Alexander S. Dent
Associate Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs
George Washington University

Dr. Dent's current research reconceives digital textuality as a way to critique the violent policing of media “piracy.” He also seeks to expose the use of intellectual property laws to curtail participation in global economies -- particularly informal ones.  A second project analyses the role of “confidence” in establishing political and economic authority.   A third project focuses on Brazilian punk-rock in order to understand the role of music in fostering social change.   A new fourth project, funded by the National Science Foundation, examines cellular phone use among teenagers in Washington DC.  His last book analyzed the post-authoritarian popularity of Brazilian "country" music and rodeo as a way to unify theories of performance from linguistic anthropology, media, and performance studies; the book also sought to expand on notions of center and periphery as ways of accounting for popular culture under contemporary capitalism.

Marcelo de Oliveira Dietrich
Assistant Professor of Comparative Medicine and Neuroscience
Yale University

Marcelo O. Dietrich joined the Yale Medical School as an Assistant Professor in Comparative Medicine and Neuroscience in 2014. He received his MD and PhD degrees from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil). His laboratory at Yale is dedicated to the study of animal behaviors and their underlying mechanisms.

Marshall C. Eakin
Professor of History
Vanderbilt University

Marshall Eakin is a historian of Latin America specializing in the history of Brazil. Although his work spans all of Brazilian history, his major publications have concentrated on the processes of nationalism and nation-building, economic and business history, and industrialization—primarily in the twentieth century. Much of his work addresses audiences beyond the academy. This work includes Brazil: The Once and Future Country (St. Martin’s, 1997), a one-volume introduction to Brazil for beginners; two video courses with the Great Courses, The Conquest of the Americas and The Americas in a Revolutionary Era; and The History of Latin America: Collision of Cultures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

Over the past fifteen years he has been deeply involved in service-learning courses and programs. From 2009-2017 Eakin was the Faculty Director of the Ingram Scholarship Program. The program sponsors students who demonstrate a willingness and ability to combine a successful business or professional career with a lifelong commitment to finding solutions to critical societal problems.

James N. Green
Carlos Manuel de Cespedes Professor of Modern Latin American History and Portuguese and Brazilian Studies; Director of the Brazil Initiative
Brown University

James N. Green is the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Professor of Latin American History. He received his doctorate in Latin American history, with a specialization in Brazil, at UCLA in 1996. He has traveled extensively throughout Latin America and lived eight years in Brazil. He served as the Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University from 2005 to 2008. He is a past president of the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA) and served as the President of the New England Council on Latin American Studies (NECLAS) in 2008 and 2009. He is currently the Director of Brown's Brazil Initiative; the Executive Director of the Brazilian Studies Association, housed at Brown; and the Director of the Opening the Archives Project.

Marguerite Itamar Harrison
Associate Professor of Spanish & Portuguese
Smith College

Marguerite Itamar Harrison is a Sherrerd teaching award-winning professor who teaches interactive language and interdisciplinary courses in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies.In 2007, she edited Uma Cidade em Camadas, a volume of transnational essays on contemporary Brazilian writer Luiz Ruffato. Raised in a Brazilian-American household, she is a practitioner of literary translation. She guest-edited a 2016 special issue of the translation journal Metamorphoses devoted to contemporary Brazilian fiction.

Harrison's scholarship in contemporary Brazilian fiction and art addresses ways in which literature and visual culture may contribute to raising social consciousness in terms of gender, class and race. Her ongoing research on Brazilian filmmaking comments on the dictatorship's effects on marginalized groups, focusing on women filmmakers' challenge to dominant codes by redirecting the cinematic gaze to confront inequities.

Erika Helgen
Assistant Professor of Latino/a Christianity
Yale University

Erika Helgen completed her Ph.D. in history at Yale in 2015, her dissertation exploring Protestants, Catholics, and the struggle for Brazilian national identity between 1916 and 1945. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research at St. John’s University in Minnesota. Dr. Helgen’s chapter “In Light of the Council: Bishops, Priests, and CELAM” appears in The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Christianity, Eds. Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, Manuel Vásquez, and David Orique (forthcoming from Oxford University Press), and she has also published journal articles dealing with pluralism and religious history in Mexico.

Kenneth David Jackson
Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies for Portuguese
Yale University

Kenneth David Jackson specializes in Portuguese and Brazilian literatures, modernist movements in literature and other arts, Portuguese literature and culture in Asia, poetry, music, and ethnography. His book Machado de Assis: A Literary Life was released by Yale UP in 2015. He is co-translator of Industrial Park (1993) by Patrícia Galvão and Seraphim Grosse Pointe (1979) by Oswald de Andrade.

Kenneth was named to the International Advisory Board of the Centro Interuniversitario de Estudos Camonianos at the Unversidade de Coimbra (Portugal). He conducted field research in Sri Lanka and India, was a Fulbright lecturer and researcher in Brazil (1984, 1990-91) and has performed as a cellist in several professional orchestras and a string quartet.

Albert Icksang Ko
Department Chair and Professor of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases) and of Medicine (Infectious Diseases)
Yale School of Public Health

Professor Ko's research centers on the health problems that have emerged as a consequence of rapid urbanization and social inequity. He coordinates a research and training program on urban slum health in Brazil and is conducting prospective community-based studies on rat-borne leptospirosis, dengue, meningitis and respiratory infections. His research particularly focuses on understanding the transmission dynamics and natural history of leptospirosis, which is as a model for an infectious disease that has emerged in slum environments due to the interaction of climate, urban ecology and social marginalization. Current research combines multidisciplinary epidemiology, ecology and translational research-based approaches to identify prevention and control strategies that can be implemented in slum communities.

More recently, Dr. Ko and his team has mobilized the public health research capacity at their site in the city of Salvador, Brazil to investigate the on-going outbreak of Zika virus infection and microcephaly. Dr. Ko is also Program Director at Yale for the Fogarty Global Health Equity Scholars Program which provides research training opportunities for US and LMIC post and pre-doctoral fellows at collaborating international sites.

Mary Ann Mahony
Professor of History
Central Connecticut State University

Dr.  Mahony is Professor of History and coordinator of the Latin American Studies section of the International Studies Program at Central Connecticut State University.  She holds a Ph.D. from Yale University, an M.A. in History from Tufts University and a B.A. in Spanish Language and Literature from the College of the Holy Cross.  She is the recipient of two Fulbright Fellowships for teaching and research in Brazil, the first in 2002 at the Universidade Federal da Bahia and the second in 2018 at the Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz, in Ilhéus Bahia, as well as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Faculty.  She is widely regarded as the authority in English and Portuguese on the history of Bahia’s cacao region and the author of 9 peer reviewed articles on Brazilian history, emphasizing political representations of history, family history and the history of slavery and freedom in Bahia’s cacao area.  She received the 2016 Best Article Prize of the Brazil Section of the Latin American Studies Association for her article “A Vida e os Tempos de João Gomes:  Escravidão, negociação e resistência no Atlântico Negro”, Special Issue on the Atlantic World.  Revista Crítica Histórica. Nº 13, 2016.  http://www.revista.ufal.br/criticahistorica/

Professor Mahony is also the translator and author of the introduction of Crossroads of Freedom (Duke University Press, 2016), the English translation of Walter Fraga Filho, Encruzilhadas da Liberdade (Editora UNICAMP, 2006), winner of the 2011 American Historical Association’s Clarence H. Haring Prize. 

Professor Mahony is currently the nineteenth and early twentieth century Brazil editor of the Library of Congress’ Handbook of Latin American Studies biannual bibliography.  She has been a member of the Executive Committee of the New England Council on Latin American Studies and she has chaired the Brazilian Studies Committee of the Conference on Latin American History. She has served as a panel reviewer for fellowships with the Fulbright Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the U.S. Library of Congress Kluge Fellowships.

Professor Mahony’s teaching interests include the broad sweep of Latin American history, Brazilian history, the history of enslavement and freedom in Latin America, environmental history, the history of export regions in Latin America, as well as social and cultural history. Her former graduate students teach at the college and university level at the Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz, the University of Michigan, Saint Mary’s College, and the University of Winnipeg; her undergraduate students teach in the public school systems of Connecticut and California.

Florencia Montagnini
Senior Research Scientist; Director, Program in Tropical Forestry, Global Institute of Sustainable Forestry
Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Science

Professor Montagnini’s research focuses on variables controlling the sustainability of managed ecosystems in the tropics, such as forest, tree plantations and agroforestry systems, with a special emphasis on Latin America; sustainable land use systems that integrate ecological principles with economic, social, and political factors; the principles and applications of forest landscape restoration; the reforestation of degraded lands with native species; mixed-species plantations; tropical plantation silviculture; identification and quantification of ecological services provided by forest ecosystems, including biodiversity, carbon sequestration and watershed protection; organic farming using indigenous resources; Payments for Environmental Services as tools to promote restoration, conservation, and rural development.

Projects that she is currently conducting include examining the role of native tree species in plantations and agroforestry systems in reclaiming degraded areas with species of economic value; the identification and quantification of ecological services provided by forests (biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration, and water); and organic farming in agroforestry systems with native species. Professor Montagnini has written ten books on agroforestry systems and ecological restoration, including a major textbook in tropical forest ecology and management, and about 200 scientific articles, of which 80% have been published in international refereed journals. She teaches courses in tropical forest ecology and management, soil science, agroforestry, and restoration ecology. She also holds honorary professorships at several universities in Latin America.

Pedro Meira Monteiro
Arthur W. Marks ’19 Professor of Spanish and Portuguese
Princeton University

Pedro Meira Monteiro teaches courses on Latin America with a special focus on literature and society in Brazil, ranging from fiction, poetry, essays and music, to politics, race and citizenship. Working in the intersection of intellectual history and literature, Professor Meira Monteiro has combined academic production with the writing of shorter texts for cultural magazines, blogs and newspapers. He has edited, translated and authored several books, which include The Other Roots: Wandering Origins in Roots of Brazil and the Impasses of Modernity in Ibero-America (University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), Conta-gotas: Máximas & Reflexões (e-galáxia, 2016), and The First Class: Transits of Brazilian Literature Abroad (Itaú Cultural, 2014, also available in Portuguese and Spanish).

Professor Meira Monteiro has led several international initiatives at Princeton. From 2013 to 2017 he co-directed the Princeton/University of São Paulo network on “Race and Citizenship in the Americas.” Along with Nicola Cooney, Professor Meira Monteiro co-directs the Princeton summer programs in Brazil and Portugal. He has been a visiting professor and has lectured around the world.

 Amy Nunn

Associate Professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences, Associate Professor of Medicine
Brown University

Dr. Amy Nunn is an Associate Professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the Brown University School of Public Health. She holds a secondary appointment in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Brown University Medical School. She is also the Executive Director of the Rhode Island Public Health Institute (RIPHI). Dr. Nunn conducts applied research on how to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in HIV infection, treatment and care.

A social scientist by training, she has worked in several countries and conducted domestic and international research on a variety of health topics, including HIV/AIDS, access to reproductive health services, and family planning. Dr. Nunn has also conducted global health policy research that explores how politics, economics and intellectual property rights affect AIDS policy and access to medicines in developing countries. She is the author of the book "The Politics and History of AIDS Treatment in Brazil," whose foreword was written by Brazilian President Fernando Cardoso, and which was published in 2009 by Springer. She has also written numerous peer-reviewed articles about Brazil's AIDS treatment program.

Stuart Schwartz
George Burton Adams Professor of History
Yale University

Professor Schwartz, who received his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1968, specializes in the History of colonial Latin America, especially Brazil and on the history of Early Modern expansion. Among his books are Sovereignty and Society in Colonial Brazil (1973), Early Latin America (1983), Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society (1985), Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels (1992), as editor, A Governor and His Image in Baroque Brazil (1979), Implicit Understandings (1994), Victors And Vanquished: Spanish and Nahua Views of the Conquest of Mexico (2000), Cambridge History Of Native Peoples Of The Americas. South America (1999), and All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (2008). He is presently working on several projects: a history of independence of Portugal and the crisis of the Iberian Atlantic, 1620-1670; and a social history of Caribbean hurricanes.

Daniel Sharp
Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and Chair of the Newcomb Department of Music
Tulane University

Daniel’s research and teaching interests include ethnomusicology, especially focused on Latin America; cultural studies of popular music; nostalgia, cultural citizenship and the performance of roots; and critical issues surrounding ethnographic writing and recording. His ethnographic field research focuses on Northeast Brazil, a region cloaked in nostalgia and renown as historically unique, artistically pivotal and economically marginalized (not unlike New Orleans).

Daniel examines how musicians from this region struggle with being distanced from the national 'here and now' within narratives of Brazil's origins. He chronicles the career trajectories of two musical groups—Samba de Coco Raizes de Arcoverde and Cordel do Fogo Encantado—within the broader register of the Northeast's place as a reservoir of folklore within the national imaginary. He argues that by performing 'home,' the musicians acquire the ghostly status of fetishes of culture loss, hovering between the center and the margins.

Felipe Sartori Sigollo
National Deputy Executive Secretary of the Ministry of Education of Brazil

Felipe Sigollo, 39, Civil Engineer, is currently the National Deputy Executive Secretary of the Ministry of Education, coordinating six national secretaries, subsidiaries to the Ministry.

Previously, Mr. Sigollo has held the position of State Secretary of Social Development of São Paulo – State Governement – between 2015-2016. He also directed the “Companhia Paulista de Obras e Serviços – CPOS” – (São Paulo Government Company of Construction works and Services) from 2011 to 2014. He has worked at the state and municipal levels in Brazil, as a state secretary, as well as a deputy mayor of two regions of city of São Paulo. Mr. Sigollo has over 15 years of experience in public administration and leadership, been alongside great managers and politicians, always acting in the executive area, developing and implementing governmental programs.

Luiz F. Valente
Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies and Comparative Literature; Director of Brown-in-Brazil Program
Brown University

A native of Rio de Janeiro, Professor Valente was educated in Brazil and the United States. His teaching and research interests include: 1. Brazilian narrative of the 19th and 20th centuries, with special emphasis on José de Alencar, João Guimarães Rosa, João Ubaldo Ribeiro, Euclides da Cunha, and Lima Barreto; 2. the relationship between fiction and history; 3. the construction of national identity and the representation of the nation; 4. comparative literature, particularly the modern historical novel and the literature of the Americas; 5. theory of literature, particularly the narrative; 6. Brazilian poetry since 1945.

Professor Valente is co-founder and Co-Editor of Brasil/Brazil: A Journal of Brazilian Literature, Consulting Editor for Latin American Literature of The Explicator, and on the editorial boards of Luso-Brazilian Review, Ellipsis, SOLETRAS, and Aletria: Revista de Estudos de Literatura. He has also served as a member of the Executive Committee of the Division of Luso-Brazilian Literature of the Modern Language Association (MLA) twice, is a former member of the Executive Committee of the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages (ADFL), and is currently a delegate to the MLA General Assembly, representing the New England region.

Sponsors