BRASA vice-president candidates

 

Anthony W. Pereira

 

        I have been nominated as Vice-President of BRASA, and am very pleased about that. I served on the executive committee of BRASA from 2001 to 2004. During that time, working with Eduardo Gomes, I helped to organize the politics sections of the 2002 and 2004 BRASA congresses, held in Atlanta and Rio de Janeiro respectively. I am currently involved in a new venture to expand the study of Brazil in the United Kingdom and Europe. As Director of the Brazil Institute at King’s College London, I have created new interdisciplinary MA and PhD programs on Brazil, organized seminars and conferences, and expanded our links with Brazilian universities and funding agencies. Unlike most Brazil programs, the Brazil Institute at King’s is not housed within a Latin American Studies Program, but instead stands alongside, and collaborates with, other institutes dedicated to research and teaching on the other BRICs (Russia, India, and China) as well as selected world regions (North America, the Middle East and Mediterranean, and Africa). I am therefore both professionally and intellectually committed to studying Brazil in global perspective.
         I am a political scientist, and my engagement with Brazil started in the second half of the 1980s, when I undertook a research project on rural trade unionism in the sugar zone (zona da mata) of Pernambuco. I have returned to Brazil frequently since then and have lived for brief periods in both São Paulo and Recife, including in 2005-6, when I was a Fulbright scholar at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE). My book Ditadura e Repressão, a comparison of political repression in Brazil, Chile and Argentina in the 1960s and 1970s, was recently published by Paz e Terra in Brazil. My current work concerns the struggle for human rights and public security reform in Brazil in the current period. In a recent project I have branched out to look at the issue of human rights in Brazilian foreign policy. I serve on the editorial board of the journals Human Rights Review and Latin American Perspectives and worked at Tulane, the University of East Anglia (UK), Tufts, Harvard, and the New School before starting at King’s College London in 2010. My journal articles include publications in Comparative Political Studies, Social Justice, Luso-Brazilian Review, Latin American Politics and Society, Constellations, Latin American Research Review, Third World Quarterly, and Journal of Modern African Studies.
         In recent years the world has changed. The rise of East Asia and the economic crisis in the United States and Europe have made global governance more multipolar. Brazil has become more prominent, and has strengthened its ties with countries in the global South. BRASA can respond to these changes by expanding its membership and incorporating new research into its international congresses. An important part of BRASA’s mission, in my view, is to introduce the study of Brazil to non-Brazilians, including scholars in places that lack a tradition of Brazilianist scholarship. BRASA can also facilitate communication between scholars of Brazil wherever they live, and help them make international connections and find new audiences for their research. I look forward to contributing to this important work.

 

Steven F. Butterman

 

 

 

              I am very happy and proud to accept the Executive Committee’s nomination and become a candidate for Vice-President of BRASA.  As a scholar of Brazilian literary and cultural studies, especially in the context of gender and queer theory, I have published extensively in each of these areas.  My first book came out in 2005 with San Diego State University Press.  Perversions on Parade:  Brazilian Literature of Transgression and Postmodern Anti-Aesthetics in Glauco Mattoso analyzes “marginal” cultural production, specifically examining the motif of homosexuality and its repression and regulation under military dictatorship. My current book treats Queer Identities and LGBT Culture in Brazil Today, studies recent sociopolitical developments in the gay rights movement, with chapters devoted to careful analysis of the discourses of NGOs and governmental agencies established to promote human rights for gender identity and sexual minorities in contemporary Brazil. Currently, I am in the process of finishing a third book, which is scheduled to go into production in early 2012 and is under contract with a major press in Brazil, SJT Saúde, Educação, Cultura e Editora.  This study will be published in Portuguese and is entitled (in English translation): Witnessing (In)Visibility:  Journalistic  Representations of the Largest Gay Pride Parade on the Planet.

              My dedication to Brazilian cultural studies and to Brazil in relation to the rest of the world goes well beyond the realm of book publication.  Together with a colleague from the University of Florida and a colleague presently tenured at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, we co-organized the first “Brazilians Outside Brazil:  Brasileiros fora do Brasil” symposium, hosted at the University of Miami in 2002. In 2004, I was elected to the Executive Committee of BRASA, serving a four-year term in what I consider to be the most important international organization in the interdisciplinary field of Brazilian studies, where I served from 2004-2008. The following year, I was nominated elected to serve on the Executive Committee / Advisory Board of the Luso-Brazilian Language and Literature Division of the Modern Language Association (MLA) from 2005-2009, the most prestigious organization in the field of foreign language, literary and cultural studies, becoming the President of the Division in 2009. My additional administrative qualifications include the following roles: Associate Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures (2008-2011), Director of the Portuguese Program at the University of Miami (2000 to present), and I have recently begun a new position as Director of the Program in Women’s and Gender Studies (2011-2014).  I was the first faculty member to teach Queer (LGBTQ) Studies at U.M., inaugurating the course in spring 2006.  On October 17, 2011, the faculty approved the new minor in LGBTQ studies, and I am proud to have coordinated the drafting of that proposal, with the support of numerous colleagues from various disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields.

              Given the increasing prominence of Brazil, both in economic terms and in dissemination of its language and culture, I would be honored to help take BRASA to the next level by focusing attention and collaboration with the numerous contacts I have made during the past twelve years in South Florida.  As a recipient of the Brazilian International Press Award, I am fortunate to have met many Brazilianists and brasilófilos who are not necessarily Brazilian by nationality nor academics by occupation.  I think BRASA has done an excellent job of bringing university and college faculty into its fold, but I would like to work to increase the participation of journalists, translators, artists, musicians, and others who passionately dedicate themselves to internationally disseminating Brazilian culture and the Portuguese language.  To that end, I would take pleasure in collaborating with the Brazilian Cultural Centers in South Florida and beyond to encourage increased membership and involvement.

             In academic terms, I have devoted much time and effort to mentoring a variety of graduate students who have studied Brazilian culture in connection to other Latin American nations (e.g., Haiti, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Perú) and would work hard to continue the excellent groundwork already done by my colleagues on the BRASA leadership in developing a forum specifically for graduate students.  Last year, I had the honor and privilege of participating in a PhD defense, which was the first co-tutela between a Brazilian university (Universidade de Brasília) and a French institution (Université de Rennes 2).  I believe it is critical for us to encourage international partnerships to enhance a far more global and diverse understanding of brasilidades both within Brazil and well beyond its political boundaries.

 

 

BRASA Executive Committee candidates

 

 

Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour

              I am extremely pleased to be a candidate for the Executive Committee of BRASA. I am currently an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Denison University. I received my PhD in Political Science at the University of Chicago (2008) and have held postdoctoral fellowships at Duke University and Johns Hopkins University.

              Brazil has become a country of interest for a number of people including scholars, business people and civil society organizations as it has emerged as one of the world’s leading economy. BRASA serves as an organization that brings together scholars of various disciplines focusing on Brazil and as Brazil continues to be an important country in the world, BRASA will continue to become an important intellectual space that brings together scholars interested in issues relevant to Brazil.

             I became a member of BRASA in 2006 and have met a number of scholars from countries such as Brazil, the United States, and Germany. These interactions have led to scholarly collaborations including a peer reviewed journal article as well as my co-authored edited volume, Brazil’s New Racial Politics (Lynne Rienner Publishers). This edited volume includes Brazilian and American scholars including sociologists, political scientists, and an anthropologist. The scholarship is important as it examines racial policies and politics in Brazil that have incorporated Afro-Brazilians into the Brazilian nation. BRASA has served as an important site for scholars working on such issues as it has provided dialogue among scholars concerned with such issues.

              As a member of the Executive Council I would advocate for interaction and intellectual collaborations between scholars from various disciplines. I am interested in increasing BRASA’s membership and would like to increase membership among junior scholars. I will work to continue BRASA’s mission to promote Brazilian studies and build relations between scholars studying Brazil.

 

John S. Burdick

 

             I am a professor of anthropology at Syracuse University. Here, in my little corner of academe, long before the current “Brazil boom”, I have worked to bring Brazil onto the radar screen of SU’s students, faculty and staff. Starting in the mid-1990s, I offered courses on Brazilian culture and politics; in the early 2000s, as the Director of SU’s Program on Latin America and the Caribbean, I convinced administrators at SU that Portuguese language instruction was essential to the next generation of students; and since the mid-2000s, I have led the effort at SU to create short and long-term study abroad programs for our students in Rio and Salvador. With regard to BRASA, over the years I have participated in a variety of ways – as paper presenter, as appointee to BRASA’s national review of Brazilian study programs, and twice as member of BRASA’s Roberto Reis Book Prize Committee. I am eager to deepen my involvement with the organization during this astonishingly fast-moving period to help us strategize about how to enrich and consolidate Brazilian studies at US universities – and elsewhere – in the years to come.  

             My scholarship over the past twenty years has focused on the intersection of Brazilian religion and politics. Looking for God in Brazil (U of California Press, 1993) studied the competition between pentecostalism, umbanda and liberationist Catholicism; Blessed Anastacia (Routledge, 1998) analyzed the racial politics of several of Brazil’s popular Christianities; Legacies of Liberation (Ashgate, 2004) looked at the continuing influence of liberationist Catholicism in post Cold-war Brazil; and The Color of Sound (NYU Press, 2012) investigates the connection between music and black consciousness in Brazil’s Protestant churches. I have published articles about Brazil in a variety of journals, including American Anthropologist, the Latin American Research Review, and the Journal of Latin American Studies, and co-edited three volumes that intersect with Brazilian studies: The Church at the Grassroots in Latin America (Greenwood, 2000, with Ted Hewitt), Beyond Neoliberalism in Latin America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, with Phil Oxhorn and Kenneth Roberts), and Comparative Perspectives on Afro-Latin America (University Press of Florida, 2012, with Kwame Dixon).

 

Tom Rogers

 

             I am pleased to be nominated for a seat on BRASA’s Executive Committee and welcome the opportunity to serve an organization that has grown along a trajectory roughly analogous to my own personal engagement with Brazil. I entered Duke University’s history graduate program in the 1990s and along the way watched the 2002 presidential campaign and election from the perspective of Recife. I finished the degree in 2005 and was back in Recife in time to watch the 2010 campaign, while I was teaching at UFPE as a Fulbright Visiting Professor. We have all seen stunning changes over these recent years (by no means all political) and BRASA, as a collectivity of members with wide-ranging interests and expertise, is one of few organizations capable of interpreting and contextualizing that change. I look forward to joining discussions about positioning the organization to most fully realize that capacity and to fulfill our mission of expanding Brazilian Studies. Our congresses offer one clear venue in this regard; they have been excellently organized and with careful thought could accomplish even more.

            I taught for six years at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where we managed two successive CAPES/FIPSE exchanges with two consortia of partner universities around Brazil. I recently joined Emory University’s History Department and have enjoyed working with graduate students who are beginning to learn about and develop attachments to Brazil. They will become lifelong members of BRASA, along with what will no doubt be a rapidly expanding group of peers from the academy and beyond. BRASA should continue to harness the energy and interest directed toward Brazil and help guide dialogues between Brazil and the U.S.

             I recently published a book on sugarcane workers and agriculture in the Northeast and am now researching Brazil’s first sugarcane ethanol boom, in the 1970s. My interests revolve around connections between workers’ experiences, environmental change, and discourses of race and landscape.

 

Jason Stanyek

 

 

              Jason Stanyek teaches at New York University where he is an assistant professor in the Department of Music and affiliated faculty at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. He was recently a Visiting Associate Professor at Harvard University and an External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. He has published on subjects ranging from Brazilian hip hop to Pan-African jazz, from intercultural free improvisation to capoeira and choro, and is completing an ethnographic monograph on Brazilian performance in the U.S. entitled Around the World Goes Around: Performing Brazilian Music and Dance in the United States. He recently co-edited a special issue of the journal Critical Studies in Improvisation on “Brazilian Improvisations” and is currently editing a volume on the history of bossa nova in the United States with Frederick Moehn. Also active as a composer, guitarist, and cavaquinho player, he has a number of recordings and film soundtracks to his credit and each summer he teaches cavaquinho at the California Brazil Camp. In June 2008 he was guest producer for an hour-long radio show called “The Brazilian Diaspora in the United States” for Public Radio International’s long-running program “Afropop Worldwide.” Since 2004 he has presented papers and has organized and chaired sessions at BRASA conferences in the U.S and in Brazil.

 

Rebecca Atencio

 

 

              I am an assistant professor of Brazilian literary and cultural studies at Tulane University, where I also direct the undergraduate Portuguese program. My research focuses on contemporary Brazilian literature and popular culture, with particular attention to their intersection with human rights activism. At present, I’m completing a book manuscript on literature and transitional justice in Brazil.

              I share with BRASA its commitment to expanding Brazilian Studies. At my own institution, this has meant working with colleagues from various departments to launch a new summer study abroad program in São Paulo, redesign our Portuguese language program (including the addition of a new major), and create new advanced-level interdisciplinary courses on Brazil that are taught in Portuguese.

              Over the past several years, I have been actively involved with several government and non-governmental programs that help fund Brazilian Studies in the US and launch new scholars, including CAPES-FIPSE (promoting exchanges between US and Brazilian universities) and FLAS (supporting undergraduate and especially graduate study of Portuguese). If elected to the Executive Committee, one of my priorities would be to advocate the expansion of these vital programs and to defend them from spending cuts.

              I have already had the opportunity to serve BRASA in a number of capacities, including as a member of the Roberto Reis book prize committee (2010) and as an affiliate with the COBRA initiative. I would be delighted to continue serving the organization as a member of its Executive Committee, a post in which I would work to increase collaborations across disciplines and among scholars in the US, Brazil, and other countries as well as to promote the expansion of Portuguese language and Brazilian Studies programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels. 

 

Brodwyn Fischer

 

 

         I am an Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University, where I directed the Latin American Studies Program from 2005-2010. I have been studying, researching, and teaching Brazilian history since 1992.  I would welcome the chance to work with BRASA executive council members in promoting Brazilian studies, facilitating transnational collaboration among researchers, advocating greater production of and access to digital resources for Brazilian studies, and highlighting Brazilian perspectives on critical international issues.

          I received my Ph.D. in Brazilian and Latin American History from Harvard University in 1999.  My own research has focused on issues of citizenship, law, race, local politics, and urban history in Rio de Janeiro and Recife, from the late 19^th century to the present.  My first book, A Poverty of Rights, was a recipient of BRASA’s Roberto Reis prize for 2007-8, and also received awards from the Conference on Latin American History, the Urban History Association, and the Social Science History Association.  I am co-editor with Bryan McCann and Javier Auyero of Cities from Scratch: Poverty and Informality in Urban Latin America, due out in 2012 with Duke University Press.  My articles have appeared in two edited volumes in Brazil (Quase cidadão, orgs. Flávio Gomes and Olívia Maria Gomes da Cunha, and Direitos e justiças, orgs. Silvia Lara and Joseli Mendonça) as well as in journals and edited volumes in the United States.  I have also presented my work in various universities in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Pernambuco.  I am currently working on a history of the uses and politics of inequality in Recife and Rio de Janeiro from abolition to the mid-20^th century, and also have projects on the histories of rural-to-urban migration and of race and politics in Recife’s mocambos.