Agenda

Interview

1. Please provide a brief outline of your training and scientific activity.

I earned my Bachelors degree in History and Latin American Studies at Princeton University (1973) and my
MA and PhD in History at Yale University (1976, 1980). My three research-based monographs focus on the
postcolonial history of Brazil. The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850-1920 (Stanford University Press, 1983) was
the first study of that crucial period based on extensive archival research. The analytical framework of the
study was to rethink and critique the standard narratives of the rubber boom era. The second monograph,
For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in São Paulo, 1920-1964
(University of North Carolina Press, 1996), was a study of programs developed by the emerging industrialist
leadership in São Paulo both for vocational training and social services oriented toward the urban working
class. Most recently, I published The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in
Brazil (Duke University Press, 2015). It is a study of the ways in which “whiteness” has been defined and
deployed by various segments of paulista society to construct a discourse of paulista exceptionalism, and to
justify an ongoing pattern of racialized and unequal development in Brazil (a pattern that is evident in
several other Latin American nations). All three books have been translated into Portuguese and published
in Brazil. I am also a co-editor and contributor to the volume The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a
Transnational History (Duke University Press, 2012). My current projects include an intellectual biography
of the Latin Americanist and criminologist Frank Tannenbaum (1893-1969).

2. Please state your reasons for choosing Venice and the Department for your research and teaching stay.

My current interests make a research and teaching stay in a department with an explicitly comparative
approach to cultural studies especially attractive. The biographical project examines the life and career of a
public intellectual whose interests and experiences spanned the history of the Mexican Revolution, labor
movements, comparative race relations, and the social construction of criminal identities. My other
ongoing interest is the formation of middle-class cultures in Latin America; the Department of Linguistics
and Comparative Cultural Studies will provide an ideal venue for discussing this cultural-studies topic from
a comparative perspective.

3. Have you ever had a research collaboration with the teaching staff of Department of Linguistics and
Comparative Cultural Studies in the past?

I have not collaborated with any of the continuing faculty but I have collaborated with Dr. Claudia Stern,
who is currently a visiting research scholar and who shares my interest in the history and culture of the
middle classes in Latin America.