Joseph Younger, Department of History, Princeton University, Ph.D. candidate
My research focuses on the development of legal identities and boundaries in the tumultuous context of Brazil’s southern borderlands over the course of the first half of the nineteenth century. Focusing in particular on the Farapos Rebellion between 1835 and 1845 in Rio Grande do Sul, my research explores questions of the meaning of law and legality by utilizing legal source materials as a point of departure to examine how the region’s inhabitants came to recognize legitimate authority where the rule of law itself appeared to be notably absent. Examining these processes of sovereign construction through a legal lens, my research seeks to explain in concrete terms both how the region’s inhabitants fixed their respective legal rights and juridical identities, along with how competing state actors constructed their own legitimate authority, securing for themselves jurisdiction to police those boundaries.
Michael Jerome Wolff, Department of Political Science, the University of New Mexico, Ph.D. candidate
He will take 90 hours of advanced Portuguese classes and after completing the language/ culture program, he will remain in Brazil to do preliminary research on police violence in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. “The research collected over the summer of 2008 will be designed specifically to contribute to a publishable field research paper” which he intends to develop further into a (comparative) dissertation project on human rights issues.
Click here for a bibliography on Brazilian emigration with more than 250 sources prepared by Maxine Margolis, University of Florida.
