I am a historian whose research and teaching focus on Latin America in global perspective with research and teaching focuses on inequality, Catholicism, urban history, and the Cold War. At present, I am a Fulford Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College with a joint appointment in the Faculty of History and the OSGA Latin American Centre at the University of Oxford. Concurrently, I am a postdoctoral research fellow for the transnational project, “The Global Pontificate of Pius XII: Catholicism in a Divided World” based at the German Historical Institute in Rome directed by Dr Simon Unger.
My current book manuscript, Peripheral Citizenship: Popular Movements and the Progressive Catholic Church in Urban Brazil examines how non-elite actors constructed novel understandings of rights and democracy in twentieth-century Latin America, especially through religion, and is forthcoming with the University of California Press in summer 2026.
Through my fellowship at Oxford and GHI Rome, I have developed two new lines of research. One traces the global mobilization of clergy, laypeople, and resources by the Catholic Church to Latin America from across Europe, North America, and Australia/New Zealand. The second explores the making of Catholic internationalism ‘from the south’ through a transnational history of Latin American Catholic Action.
My work has appeared in the American Historical Review, the Hispanic American Historical Review, The Americas, and the Journal of Urban History. I have written for the public in The Washington Post and ReVista: The Harvard Review of Latin America. My research has been supported by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants Scheme, a Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship, the Tinker Foundation, the Modern Endangered Archive Program, and a John Fell OUP Fund Grant from Oxford University, among others. Alongside my published scholarship, I have developed a broad portfolio of digital and public humanities projects, especially in collaborative archiving and digitization and spatial analysis, including GIS and Urban Intermedia.
Before coming to Oxford, I held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Rochester and Harvard University. I received my PhD in History from Brown University.
Current book project
Peripheral Citizenship
My book project, Peripheral Citizenship: Popular Movements and the Progressive Catholic Church in Urban Brazil, is forthcoming with the University of California Press in summer 2026. It explores how popular movements affiliated with the liberationist Catholic Church reimagined citizenship and democracy amid the mass rural-urban migration and rapid urbanization that transformed twentieth-century Latin America. Peripheral Citizenship goes within these movements to trace how they envisioned and modeled alternative understandings of the Church, rights, and democracy across Brazil’s civil-military dictatorship (1964-85) and the subsequent transition to democracy.
Research for this book has been supported by a Fulbright-Hays DDRA fellowship, the Harvard-Mellon Urban Initiative, and the Tinker Foundation. This book project builds on my dissertation, which was awarded the Best Dissertation Prize from the New England Council on Latin American Studies and the History Distinguished Dissertation Award from the Department of History at Brown University.
Ongoing projects
Revolutions in Faith: Catholicism’s Cold War in Latin America, Edited Volume
I am the co-editor with Jaime Pensado (U. of Notre Dame) and Simon Unger (GHI Rome) of an edited volume under development. This volume charts new global linkages that move beyond accounts of the Cold War centered on the conflict between the US and USSR. This project features contributions from over a dozen scholars that explore Catholicism’s transnational Cold War through one of its essential battlegrounds. We will be workshopping this volume at the “Catholicism and the Cold War in Latin America” conference at the University of Oxford on Nov. 21-22, 2024 with the generous support of The Global Pontificate of Pius XII project, the Faculty of History, and the Latin American Centre.
Óscar Romero with Pope John Paul II, 1979. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
“Revisiting the Brazilian Democratic Transition,” thematic issue of Latin American Perspectives
I am co-editing a thematic issue of the interdisciplinary journal Latin American Perspectives with Felipe Loureiro (Universidade de São Paulo) to mark the 40th anniversary of the restoration of democratic rule in Brazil following twenty-one years of dictatorship (1964-1985). The issue is currently accepting submissions as long as the CFP is active on LAP’s website.
Click the following links for CFPs in English and Portuguese.