I am a historian whose research and teaching focus on Latin America and the global history of Catholicism. At present, I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of History and the OSGA Latin American Centre and an associate member of St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford. Through my fellowship, I am part of the transnational project, “The Global Pontificate of Pius XII: Catholicism in a Divided World.'“
My current research examines how people excluded from full citizenship contested those exclusions and constructed alternative forms of civic belonging amid sweeping societal and political change in twentieth-century Brazil in conjunction with the progressive Catholic Church. A parallel line of inquiry in my work explores how historians can work with historically marginalized communities through collaborative archiving and digitization projects as well as spatial analysis using methods such as GIS and Urban Intermedia.
My work has appeared or is forthcoming 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 the Leverhulme Trust through the 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.
Before coming to Oxford, I held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University and the University of Rochester. I received my PhD in History from Brown University.
Current book project
Peripheral Citizenship
My book project, Peripheral Citizenship: Popular Movements and the Catholic Church in Urban Brazil, is under contract with the University of California Press. 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 Brazil. 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.