Latin American History
Four historians of Latin America offer opportunities for study in a variety of fields of Latin American history, both colonial and modern, with fields of specialization that include Spanish South America, Brazil, and Mexico, intellectual, legal, social, gender, and environmental history. Other faculty research fields include the history of slavery and the slave trade and the history of political violence. Graduate students take a variety of classes and directed readings with professors in Latin American history, but are also encouraged to take advantage of courses in other regions, including Africa, Asia, Europe, and the United States. In addition, students are encouraged to take courses offered by an extensive Latin Americanist faculty in other departments.
- Herbert Tico Braun
Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Latin American History, Colombia, Mexico, political culture and the search for social order, social hierarchies, historical narrative, the history of emotions. Publications: The Assassination of Gaitán: Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia, 1986 (Mataron a Gaitán: Vida pública y violencia urbana en Colombia, 1987, 1994, 2008); Our Guerrillas, Our Sidewalks: A Journey into the Violence of Colombia, 1994, 2003 (El rescate: Diario de una negociación con la guerrilla (1998). Current research: A history of the emotional lives of urban and rural Colombians in la Violencia of the 1950s. 1998); La Frontera: Land, Labor, and Ecological Change in Chile's Temperate Rainforests (under contract, Duke University Press). - Roquinaldo Ferreira
Colonial Brazil: early Portuguese contacts with indigenous societies, indigenous and African slavery, transatlantic slave trade, African culture, trading networks between Brazil and India (Carreira da India). Atlantic World: early plantation system in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the US; coastal societies in Africa (Angola and the Bight of Benin) and their social and cultural interaction with Brazil. I am at work on a book on the development of Atlantic slaving in Angola in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Additional book length projects include a social history of abolitionism (Africa and Brazil) in the nineteenth century and a social History of the city of Luanda, Angola. - Thomas Klubock
The history of gender and sexuality, working-class history, and environmental history in twentieth-century Latin America, with a focus on modern Chile. Currently, I am finishing up a book that brings together the approaches and methodologies of social and environmental history to examine the history of Chile's native temperate rain forests. This book examines the environmental history of the rain forest as linked to the process of modern state formation, the history of the frontier, conflicts over land and labor, and the politics of nationalism, citizenship, and ethnicity. Representative publications: Contested Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile's El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904-1951 (Duke University Press, 1998); La Frontera: Land, Labor, and Ecological Change in Chile's Temperate Rainforests (under contract, Duke University Press). - Brian Owensby
As part of my continuing thinking about the epistemological and theoretical issues of doing history in Latin America, I am writing a series of articles on Sérgio Buarque de Holanda's ground-breaking Raizes do Brasil (1936). My next book-length project will be a reflection on the Jesuit project among indigenous peoples in Spanish and Portuguese South America during the period up to the expulsion of the Society in the 1760s. I see this as a way to ask broad questions about the relationship between the European Enlightenment and Latin America's dilemmas and development in a period of formative modernity. Having written two books probing fundamental tropes of modernity—the “middle class” and the “rule of law”—I see these current projects as raising critical questions regarding the dilemmas and possibilities of historical thinking in Latin America.
» Graduate Students
- Anne M. Daniels
I'm primarily focused on technologies in early 20th century Brazil. Specifically, I'm interested in how conceptualizations of 'the new' and 'the future' interacted with widespread immigration. I hope to work at a juncture of political, social, and cultural history. Through my research I forage in urban history, literature, and the history of science. Additional countries of interest include Cuba and Mexico."
