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November 30 – December 1, 2018 Conference

The Ministry of Education in Brazil and the Council on Latin American & Iberian Studies at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University were pleased to co-host an interdisciplinary conference on Brazilian Studies in the United States. This conference had a focused theme around collaborative research. The conference convened at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut on November 30 - December 1, 2018.

This conference gathered an interdisciplinary group of scholars with expertise on Brazilian studies with an emphasis on the sciences and collaborative research, and to further an exchange on the future of Brazilian studies in the United States. In addition to key scholars on Brazilian studies, prominent administrators and representatives from the Brazilian Ministry of Education attended the conference. The following interdisciplinary themes were explored:

  • Anthropology, Ecology, Environmental Sciences
  • Art History, Ethnomusicology, Communications, Education
  • History, Literature
  • Public Health, Medicine
  • Law, Political Science
  • Sociology, Demography, Urban Planning

Program

Friday, November 30

Henry R. Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue

12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.

Optional: Special Pop-Up Exhibit

Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscripts Library
Location: 121 Wall Street, New Haven, CT 06511

Visit the Beinecke for a special viewing of a selection of rare materials relating to Brazil from the sixteenth century to the present

*Note different location - Luce Hall is a 10 minute walk from the Beinecke.

2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.

Opening Comments

Pericles Lewis

Vice President for Global Strategy; Deputy Provost for International Affairs, Yale University

Claudia Valeggia

Professor of Anthropology and Spanish and Portuguese; Chair of the Council on Latin American & Iberian Studies, Yale University

Felipe Sartori Sigollo

National Deputy Executive Secretary of the Ministry of Education of Brazil

Kenneth David Jackson

Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies for Portuguese, Yale University

Carlos Ivan Simonsen Leal

President of Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

3:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.

Anthropology, Ecology, Environmental Sciences

Discussion Question: Thinking about the development and protection of large biomes, how do studies about Brazil and the exchange of knowledge with Brazilian universities contribute to this debate in U.S. academies?

Moderator: Florencia Montagnini

Senior Research Scientist; Director, Program in Tropical Forestry, Global Institute of Sustainable Forestry, Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies

Suzanne Oakdale

Associate Professor of Convener and Ethnology, University of New Mexico

Jung-Eun Lee

Assistant Professor of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences, Brown University

Bette Loiselle

Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation; Director, Tropical Conservation and Development Program; Director, Center for Latin American Studies, University of Florida

4:30 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.

Law & Political Science

Discussion Question: How does the foreign view of the American academy contribute to the development of research on Brazilian politics and institutions in both countries?

Moderator: Daniel Vargas

Professor of Law, FGV Law School

Sérgio Guerra

Dean, FGV Law School

David Trubek

Voss-Bascom Professor of Law; Dean of International Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Fabio de Sa e Silva

Assistant Professor of International Studies; Wick Cary Professor of Brazilian Studies, University of Oklahoma

6 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.

Dinner

(for invited guests only)

Saturday, December 1

9:00 a.m. – 9:30 a.m.

Breakfast

9:30 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.

History & Literature

Discussion Question: What are the challenges in research on Brazilian history and literature at US universities: elements of attraction and indifference from American students to exchanges with Brazilian universities?

Moderator: Stuart Schwartz

George Burton Adams Professor of History, Yale University

Dain Borges

Associate Professor of History, Romance Languages & Literatures, and The College, University of Chicago

César Braga-Pinto

Professor of Brazilian, Lusophone African and Comparative Literature, Northwestern University

Seth W. Garfield

Professor of History, University of Texas, Austin

11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.

Culture – Art History, Communications & Education

Discussion Questions: In thinking about research in Brazilian culture and education from the perspective of the American academy, how important are these fields of research in the United States? What is their place in the academy at present, and what is the importance to the academy of their contribution to Brazil? Have you seen any change in these perspectives?

Moderator: Cécile Fromont

Associate Professor of Art History, Yale University

David Plank

Research Professor and Executive Director of Policy Analysis for California Education, Stanford University School of Education

Joseph Straubhaar

Amon G. Carter Centennial Professor of Communication, The University of Texas, Austin

12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.

Lunch

Luce Hall Common Room, Second Floor

1:30 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.

Sociology, Demography & Urban Planning

Discussion Question: Regarding studies on urban formation and Brazilian environmental challenges from the US perspective, what are the best ways in which US researchers can contribute to the debate in Brazil?

Moderator: Claudia Valeggia

Professor of Anthropology and Spanish and Portuguese; Chair, Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies, Yale University

John Logan

Professor of Sociology, Brown University

Brodwyn Fischer

Professor of Latin American History and the College, University of Chicago

3:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.

Public Health & Medicine

Discussion Questions: With respect to public health and medicine, how to effectively study Brazil as a field study? What impacts and challenges are there for the exchange of this knowledge developed between American and Brazilian universities?

Moderator: Albert Ko

Department Chair and Professor of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases) and of Medicine (Infectious Diseases), Yale School of Public Health

Marcelo de Oliveira Dietrich

Assistant Professor of Comparative Medicine and of Neuroscience, Yale School of Medicine

Marcia Castro

Professor of Demography, T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University

Mitermayer Reis

Researcher of Molecular Epidemiology and Immunopathogenesis of Parasitic and Genetic Infectious Diseases, Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz)

4:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Closing Comments

Fernando de Mello Barreto

Consul General of Brazil in Hartford

Carlos Ivan Simonsen Leal

President of Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Stuart Schwartz

George Burton Adams Professor of History, Yale University

5:00 p.m.

Reception

Luce Hall Common Room, Second Floor

Speakers and Guests

Fernando de Mello Barreto

Consul General of Brazil in Hartford

Ambassador Barreto’s diplomatic service to Brazil has included stints as ambassador to Australia and to Russia and as delegate to the World Trade Organization, and he is now Consul General of Brazil in Hartford. In Brazil, Ambassador Barreto was a member of the Minister’s cabinet, serving in roles such as chief of staff and economic advisor.  His career spans 20 years working around the globe in Ecuador, the USA, Canada, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. Early in his career as an international lawyer in private practice, he also did some teaching. He has also written four books on Brazilian diplomatic history.

Ambassador Barreto is also pursuing a S.J.D. (Scientiae Juridicae Doctor or Doctor of the Science of Law) degree, a research-based doctorate, from University of Connecticut School of Law. In his research, he is examining and comparing anti-corruption initiatives in Brazil, the U.S., Denmark and Russia.

Dain Borges

Associate Professor of History, Romance Languages and Literatures, and the College; Executive Committe, Master of Arts Program in Social Sciences
The University of Chicago

Dain Borges is the former Faculty Director of MAPSS and Associate Professor of History, Romance Languages and Literatures, and the College. Professor Borges is a historian of Latin America, specializing in modern Brazilian social and cultural history. He is the author of The Family in Bahia, Brazil, 1870-1945. He works on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American culture and ideas. His current research project, “Races, Crowds, and Souls in Brazilian Social Thought, 1880–1920,” centers on the ways in which Brazilian intellectuals used race sociology and social psychology to understand popular religion and politics. He teaches seminars and courses on Latin American history, comparative nineteenth-century transformations, ideologies of national identity, and culture in the African diaspora. A former Director of the Center for Latin American Studies, Professor Borges is himself the graduate of an interdisciplinary MA program, working in literature and anthropology as well as history, and credits that experience with clarifying his own scholarly vocation and commitments.

César Braga-Pinto

Professor of Brazilian, Lusophone African and Comparative Literature
Northwestern University

César Braga-Pinto is a Professor of Brazilian, Lusophone African and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University. Currently he is working on a book-project that deals with representations of male friendship and interracial sociability in fiction and essays written in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery in Brazil (roughly from 1888 to the early 1930’s). Professor Braga-Pinto has previously taught at Rutgers University and was a visiting professor at Columbia University and at the Eduardo Mondlane University (Mozambique) as a Fulbright Scholar.  He was also a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Brazil Institute at King’s College in London (2013) and a post-doctoral fellow at University of São Paulo (2006-2007). In 2005 he participated in the NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) Summer Institute on African Cinema in Dakar, Senegal.

Marcia Castro

Professor of Demography
Harvard University

Marcia Castro is a founding member of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital’s Scientific Advisory Board. At Harvard, Castro serves as a member of the Faculty Advisory Committee of the Brazil Studies Program, a member of the Brazil Studies Program Steering Group of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS), and a member of the Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA) Steering Committee. Castro has applied geographical information systems, remote sensing, and spatial statistics to her research, as well as proposed novel methods in spatial analysis. She has done extensive work in the Brazilian Amazon, and has experience working in Africa. Since 2004, she has been working on the Dar es Salaam Urban Malaria Control Program, promoting the use of environmental management approaches to improve urban health. She is currently working on a project that is measuring health, poverty and place by modeling inequalities in Accra, Ghana using RS and GIS. She is also investigating the use of remotely sensed imagery to predict urban malaria in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Castro is leading a project to assess the malaria poverty vicious cycle, and she started a project to propose a new methodology to assess spatio-temporal trends in a scenario of multiple control interventions. She is also working on the issues of human mobility and asymptomatic malaria infections in the Brazilian Amazon, as well as on the potential impacts of extreme climatic events on malaria transmission in the Amazon.

Marcelo de Oliveira Dietrich

Assistant Professor of Comparative Medicine and Neuroscience
Yale University

Marcelo O. Dietrich joined the Yale Medical School as an Assistant Professor in Comparative Medicine and Neuroscience in 2014. He received his MD and PhD degrees from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil). His laboratory at Yale is dedicated to the study of animal behaviors and their underlying mechanisms.

Brodwyn Fischer

Professor of Latin American History and the College
The University of Chicago

Professor Fischer is a historian of Brazil and Latin America, especially interested in cities, citizenship, law, migration, race, and social inequality. From 2014–18 she served as director of the University of Chicago’s Center for Latin American Studies; she will return to the directorship in 2019–20. Her teaching focuses both on her core research interests and on the larger histories of Brazil, Latin America, cities, and social inequality. Professor Fischer’s current book, Understanding Inequality in Post-Abolition Brazil, explores the limits of egalitarian and emancipatory politics in Recife, Brazil, a northeastern city born of sugar and slavery, which came to be seen as both the capital of Brazilian underdevelopment and the incubator of some of the country’s most innovative social and cultural movements. In exposing the microhistory of this phenomenon in Recife, she hopes to interrogate the historical origins of urban informality and bring into a focus a paradigm of urban modernity that shapes city life across the globe. Other ongoing projects focus on the “Rights to the City” movement in law, political philosophy, and practice, the history of Brazilian slavery and abolition, and the global history of urban informality through a collaborative project entitled “La Ville informelle au XXe siècle: politiques urbaines et administration des populations.”

Cécile Fromont

Associate Professor of Art History
Yale University

Cécile Fromont is an associate professor in the history of art department at Yale University. Her writing and teaching focus on the visual, material, and religious culture of Africa and Latin America with a special emphasis on the early modern period (ca 1500-1800) and on the Portuguese-speaking Atlantic World. Her first book, The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo was published in 2014 by the University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute for Early American History. Fromont’s essays on African and Latin American art have appeared, among other venues, in the Colonial Latin American Review, African Arts, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics as well as various edited volumes and exhibition catalogues.

Fromont is a 2018 Rome Prize fellow of the American Academy in Rome. She is currently pursuing two lines of research investigating areas of intersection between visual and material culture, religion, and knowledge creation in cross-cultural environments of early modern Africa and Latin America. The first project is a study of Franciscan Capuchin images of Kongo and Angola composed between 1650 and 1750 that examines the formation and communication of cross-cultural knowledge and the second an investigation of the circulation of African visual, material, and religious culture in the early modern Atlantic world.

Seth Garfield

Professor of History
University of Texas, Austin

Seth Garfield is the author of Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil: State Policy, Frontier Expansion, and the Xavante Indians, 1939-1988 (Duke University Press, 2001), and In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region (Duke University Press, 2013), which received Honorable Mention for the Bolton-Johnson Prize, awarded by the Conference on Latin American History of the American Historical Association. His primary specialization is Brazilian history and environmental history, but he is also interested in broader questions of race and ethnicity in Latin America, indigenous policy, and comparative frontiers.

Sérgio Guerra

Director; Professor of Administrative Law
Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV) Rio de Janeiro Law School

Professor Guerra received his Post-Doctorate degree in Public Administration at FGV / EBAPE, his PhD in Economic Law from UGF, and a Master’s degree in Law from UCAM. He is currently Professor of Administrative Law at the Rio de Janeiro Law School of the Getulio Vargas Foundation - RJ, where he is also the director. Professor Guerra is the coordinator of the International Business Law Course at University of California (Irvine), referee of the Arbitration and Mediation Chamber of the Federation of Industries of Paraná, Referee of the FGV Chamber of Mediation and Arbitration, and Referee of the Brazilian Center for Mediation and Arbitration - CBMA. He is ambassador to Brazil at Yale University and editor of the Journal of Administrative Law (RDA), as well as legal adviser to the Administrative Law Commission of OAB / RJ. He has 30 years of experience in the area of public law, with emphasis on administrative, regulatory and environmental law, working mainly in the following subjects: regulatory agencies, regulation of public services and economic activities; contracting, arbitration and control of public administration. Professor Guerra is also the author of several books and legal articles.

Kenneth David Jackson

Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies for Portuguese
Yale University

Kenneth David Jackson specializes in Portuguese and Brazilian literatures, modernist movements in literature and other arts, Portuguese literature and culture in Asia, poetry, music, and ethnography. His book Machado de Assis: A Literary Life was released by Yale UP in 2015. He is co-translator of Industrial Park (1993) by Patrícia Galvão and Seraphim Grosse Pointe (1979) by Oswald de Andrade.

He was named to the International Advisory Board of the Centro Interuniversitario de Estudos Camonianos at the Unversidade de Coimbra (Portugal). He conducted field research in Sri Lanka and India, was a Fulbright lecturer and researcher in Brazil (1984, 1990-91) and has performed as a cellist in several professional orchestras and a string quartet.

Albert Ko

Department Chair and Professor of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases) and of Medicine (Infectious Diseases)
Yale School of Public Health

Dr. Albert Icksang Ko, an infectious disease physician, is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at Yale School of Public Health and Collaborating Researcher at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Brazilian Ministry of Health. His research centers on the health problems that have emerged as a consequence of rapid urbanization and social inequity. Dr. Ko coordinates a research and training program on urban slum health in Brazil and is conducting prospective studies on rat-borne leptospirosis, dengue, meningitis and other vaccine preventable diseases. His research focuses on understanding the transmission dynamics and natural history of leptospirosis, which is as a model for an infectious disease that has emerged in slum environments due to the interaction of climate, urban ecology and social marginalization. Current research combines multidisciplinary epidemiology, ecology and translational research-based approaches to identify prevention and control strategies that can be implemented in slum communities. Dr. Ko is also Program Director at Yale for the Fogarty-NIH Global Health Equity Scholars Program which provides research training opportunities for US and LMIC post and pre-doctoral fellows at 21 international collaborating research sites. Since December 2016, the research and training program in the city of Salvador, Brazil has mobilized their efforts to investigate the Zika pandemic and epidemic of Zika virus associated microcephaly and birth defects.

Carlos Ivan Simonsen Leal

President
Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV),  Rio de Janeiro

Carlos Ivan Simonsen Leal has a degree in Civil Engineering from the School of Engineering of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and a degree in Mathematical Economics from the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics (Impa). He also has a doctorate in Economics from the Getulio Vargas Foundation and a doctorate in Economics from Princeton University.

Leal began his activities as a professor at the Graduate School of Economics at Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV). While at FGV he was the director of FGV Business, the Director General of EPGE, and the Vice-President of FGV. He is currently the President of FGV, a position he has held since 2000. In 2002, he was awarded the title of Grand Cross of the National Order of Scientific Merit, granted by the Presidency of the Republic, for his contributions to science and technology.

Jung-Eun Lee

Assistant Professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences
Brown University

As an undergraduate, Jung-Eun Lee studied Earth Science Education and Chemistry at Seoul National University in South Korea. She also received her MA from Seoul National University. Her graduate study from University of California, Berkeley focused on the interpretation of Antarctic temperatures during the glacial time using stable isotope signatures (measured by other scientists) and a climate modeling. Lee worked at the University of Chicago and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory before joining Brown University in July, 2013.

Pericles Lewis

Deputy Provost for International Affairs; Vice President for Global Strategy
Yale University

Pericles Lewis earned his B.A. with first-class honors in English literature from McGill University in 1990 and his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 1997. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, he joined the Yale faculty in 1998, with appointments in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature. From 2012 to 2017 Professor Lewis served as founding president of Yale-NUS College, a collaboration between Yale and the National University of Singapore. In the provost’s office, he works closely with the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. He also oversees the Office of International Affairs and the Office of International Students and Scholars and guides Yale’s involvement in Yale-NUS College. A former member of the advisory board of the American Comparative Literature Association, Professor Lewis is the author or editor of six books on modern European literature; his current research addresses liberal education in the United States and worldwide.

John Logan

Professor of Sociology
Brown University

Dr. Logan completed his PhD in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1974. Before coming to Brown he was Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Administration at the University at Albany, SUNY; Director of the Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research; and Director of the Urban China Research Network. From 2004 through 2016 he served at Brown as Director of the research initiative on Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences. Dr. Logan is co-author, along with Harvey Molotch, of Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. His most recent edited book, Diversity and Disparities, was published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2015. His main ongoing research uses contemporary and historical census data to study changes in residential patterns with a particular emphasis on immigrants and racial minorities.  One set of studies is taking advantage of recently available 100% census microdata in the period 1880-1940, mapping people’s locations and examining patterns of neighborhood change and racial/ethnic and class segregation.  Another set of studies works with the most recent census data.  Logan is collaborating with others on research that has been given access to the confidential census files in Research Data Centers, including a unique file that makes it possible to link records for individuals over time.  These data allow him to replicate his historical research in the current period.

Bette Loiselle

Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation; Director, Tropical Conservation and Development Program; Director, Center for Latin American Studies
University of Florida

Bette Loiselle holds a joint appointment as the Director of the Tropical Conservation and Development Program (TCD) in the Center for Latin American Studies and Professor in the Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. She came to UF in 2011 following an 18 month detail as Director of the Division of Environmental Biology at the National Science Foundation. Her research focuses on understanding the importance of biodiversity in tropical systems, especially the ecological role of animals as seed dispersers, and the potential consequences of global change on distribution of plants and animals. She is also investigating the evolutionary ecology of lek-mating systems in birds and how the spatial ecology of females influences mate choice decisions and male reproductive strategies. In recent years, much of her field research has been conducted in the Ecuadorian Amazon, although other research sites include Atlantic forests of Brazil, Andes of Colombia, and tropical wet forests of Australia. The TCD Program she directs is an interdisciplinary graduate initiative began over 35 years ago and designed to convene UF students, faculty, alumni and partners to advance theory and practice in tropical conservation and development.

Florencia Montagnini

Senior Research Scientist; Director, Program in Tropical Forestry, Global Institute of Sustainable Forestry
Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies

Professor Montagnini’s research focuses on variables controlling the sustainability of managed ecosystems in the tropics, such as forest, tree plantations and agroforestry systems, with a special emphasis on Latin America; sustainable land use systems that integrate ecological principles with economic, social, and political factors; the principles and applications of forest landscape restoration; the reforestation of degraded lands with native species; mixed-species plantations; tropical plantation silviculture; identification and quantification of ecological services provided by forest ecosystems, including biodiversity, carbon sequestration and watershed protection, organic farming using indigenous resources, and payments for environmental services as tools to promote restoration, conservation, and rural development.

Projects that she is currently conducting include examining the role of native tree species in plantations and agroforestry systems in reclaiming degraded areas with species of economic value, the identification and quantification of ecological services provided by forests (biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration, and water), and organic farming in agroforestry systems with native species. Professor Montagnini has written ten books on agroforestry systems and ecological restoration, including a major textbook in tropical forest ecology and management, and about 200 scientific articles, of which 80% have been published in international refereed journals. She teaches courses in tropical forest ecology and management, soil science, agroforestry, and restoration ecology. She also holds honorary professorships at several universities in Latin America.

Suzanne Oakdale

Associate Professor of Anthropology; Convener, Ethnology
The University of New Mexico

Associate Professor Suzanne Oakdale received an appointment in the Department of Anthropology at The University of New Mexico in 1998. She offers several undergraduate and graduate level courses for Latin American Studies students, with topics such as ritual activity and its contemporary significance, theory in ethnology, identity construction in contemporary, “multicultural” Brazil, highland and lowland peoples of South America, and others. Oakdale specializes in Brazil, with research focused on Amazonian indigenous peoples. She explores the dynamics of ritual practice; history; and the social anthropology of the person and personal experience, particularly how these genres reflect and are used to address large scale social shifts.

David Plank

Professor (Research); Executive Director, Policy Analysis for California Education
Stanford University

David Plank is a Research Professor at the Stanford University School of Education, and Executive Director of Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE). He has also served as a consultant to national and international organizations including the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States Agency for International Development, the Ford Foundation, and also to governments in Africa and Latin America. Plank is the author and editor of six books, including the AERA Handbook on Educational Policy Research. He has published several studies on Brazilian Education including the book The Means of Our Salvation: Public Education in Brazil, 1930-1995, which was published in Brazil as Política Educacional no Brasil: Caminhos para a Salvação Pública. Plank was a Visiting Professor at the Federal University of Bahia from 1990 to 1995. He has also worked closely with the Brazilian Ministry of Education and Culture and the World Bank to develop and implement reforms in the country’s basic education system.

Mitermayer Reis

Researcher of Molecular Epidemiology and Immunopathogenesis of Parisitic and Genetic Infectious Diseases
Oswaldo Cruz Foundation

Mitermayer Reis is a researcher at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, a researcher category 1A of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development – CNPq, a professor at the Federal University of Bahia, a professor at the Bahia School of Medicine and Public Health and an associate visiting professor at Yale University. He is a founder associate of the Center for Management and Strategic Studies and is currently head of the Laboratory of Pathology and Molecular Biology at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, and executive coordinator of the Northeast Network of Biotechnology (RENORBIO). He is a member of the Academy of Sciences of Bahia, the Academy of Medicine of Bahia, the Scientific Technical Council of the Federation of Industries of Bahia (FIEB) and of the State Council of Science and Technology (CONCITEC). He supports the State of Bahia Research - FAPESB, and he is coordinator of the Postgraduate Course in Biotechnology in Health and Investigative Medicine. Reis has served as director of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation for four terms and is president of the Brazilian Society of Tropical Medicine, and studies clinical and molecular epidemiology and immunopathogenesis of parasitic infectious diseases oriented to technological development and innovation with emphasis on Arbovirus, Chagas, Schistosomiasis, Viral Hepatitis, Leptospirosis and Bacterial Meningitis.

Fabio de Sa e Silva

Assistant Professor of International Studies; Wick Cary Professor of Brazilian Studies
University of Oklahoma

Fabio de Sa e Silva studies the social organization and the political impact of law and justice in Brazil and comparatively. He is an affiliated fellow at Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession, where he was in residency in 2015 working in the Globalization and Lawyering in Emerging Economies or GLEE project.

Fabio has a multidisciplinary background. He holds a B.A. in legal studies from the University of Sao Paulo, where he received a prestigious CAPES fellowship for studies in law and society. He also attained a Master of Laws at the University of Brasilia Law School and a Ph.D. in Law, Policy, and Society at Northeastern University as a CAPES-Fulbright fellow. In addition to his previous academic studies and appointments, he has over 15 years of experience in policy making and analysis in issues of law and justice in Brazil, where he served at the Ministry of Justice and the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea) and consulted for international organizations like the UNDP, Unesco, and the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI).

Stuart Schwartz

George Burton Adams Professor of History
Yale University

Professor Schwartz, who received his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1968, specializes in the History of colonial Latin America, especially Brazil and on the history of Early Modern expansion. Among his books are Sovereignty and Society in Colonial Brazil (1973), Early Latin America (1983), Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society (1985), Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels (1992), as editor, A Governor and His Image in Baroque Brazil (1979), Implicit Understandings (1994), Victors And Vanquished: Spanish and Nahua Views of the Conquest of Mexico (2000), Cambridge History Of Native Peoples Of The Americas: South America (1999), and All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (2008). He is presently working on several projects: a history of independence of Portugal and the crisis of the Iberian Atlantic, 1620-1670; and a social history of Caribbean hurricanes.

Felipe Sartori Sigollo

National Deputy Executive Secretary of the Ministry of Education of Brazil

Felipe Sigollo, Civil Engineer, is currently the National Deputy Executive Secretary of the Ministry of Education, coordinating six national secretaries, subsidiaries to the Ministry.

Previously, Mr. Sigollo has held the position of State Secretary of Social Development of São Paulo – State Governement – between 2015-2016. He also directed the “Companhia Paulista de Obras e Serviços – CPOS” – (São Paulo Government Company of Construction works and Services) from 2011 to 2014. He has worked at the state and municipal levels in Brazil, as a state secretary, as well as a deputy mayor of two regions of city of São Paulo. Mr. Sigollo has over 15 years of experience in public administration and leadership, been alongside great managers and politicians, always acting in the executive area, developing and implementing governmental programs.

Joseph Straubhaar

Amon G. Carter Centennail Professor of Communication
University of Texas, Austin

Professor Joseph D. Straubhaar is the current Director of the Moody College of Communications’ Latino and Latin American Studies Program and was the Director of the Center for Brazilian Studies within the Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies, 2003-2006. His primary teaching, research and writing interests are in global media, digital media and the digital divide in the U. S. and other countries, Brazilian and Latin American television, media and migration, and global television production and flow.

Professor Strabhaar is on the editorial board for Communication Theory, International Journal of Communication, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, Comunicación y Sociedad, Chinese Journal of Communication, and Revista INTERCOM. He recently edited a book, Handbook of Research on Comparative Approaches to the Digital Age Revolution in Europe and the Americas (2015). He has also published numerous articles and essays on global media, digital inclusion, Brazilian television, Latin American media, comparative analyses of new television technologies, and media flow and culture.

David Trubek

Voss-Bascom Professor of Law; Dean of International Studies Emeritus
University of Wisconsin-Madison

David M. Trubek is Voss-Bascom Professor of Law and Dean of International Studies Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Senior Research Fellow at the Harvard Law School. A graduate of UW-Madison and the Yale Law School, Professor Trubek served as law clerk on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and as Legal Advisor to the USAID Mission to Brazil before entering the academy. He has written extensively on the role of law in development. Recent books include: The Brazilian Legal Profession in the Age of Globalization (co-editor) (2018); Law and the New Developmental State: The Brazilian Experience in Latin American Context, (co-editor) (2013) Direito, Planejamento e Desenvolvimento do Mercado de Capitais Brasileiro 1965-70 (with Gouveia Viera and Sa) (2nd edition 2011) and The New Law and Economic Development: A Critical Appraisal (with A.Santos) (2006). Dean Trubek taught at Wisconsin, Yale and Harvard Law Schools, the Catholic University Law School in Rio de Janeiro and the FGV Law School in São Paulo and has been Visiting Scholar in Residence at the European University Institute in Florence, the Fundação Joaquim Nabuco in Recife, the London School of Economics, and the Maison des Sciences de L’Homme in Paris.  Dean Trubek served as Principal Investigator of LANDS, the UW-Madison project on Law and the New Developmental State and the related project on Law and the New Developmentalism at Harvard’s Institute on Global Law and Policy (IGLP). He currently serves as co-Director of GLEE, the Project on Globalization, Lawyers, and Emerging Economies based at the Harvard Law School and as co-coordinator for IGLP’s Project on Rethinking World Trade and Investment Law. Trubek received the Kalven Prize from the Law and Society Association and in 2002 was appointed Chevalier des Palmes Academiques by the French Government in recognition of his work on globalization.

Claudia Valeggia

Professor of Anthropology and Spanish and Portuguese; Chair, Council on Latin American & Iberian Studies
Yale University

Claudia Valeggia’s work is primarily concerned with the interactions between human reproductive biology and the ecological and cultural context in which it develops. Her research program takes a biocultural approach, that is, the interplay between biology and culture takes a central role in interpreting reproductive and other demographical patterns. Some of the topics she has explored are the determinants of the return to postpartum fecundity, the variation in reproductive hormonal levels within and between women in relation to environmental variables, growth and development patterns in infants and children, and variation in male and female life history in populations experiencing drastic lifestyle changes.

Professor Valeggia is originally from Argentina, where she received her degree in biology.  She got her PhD from the University of California, Davis in 1996, then went on to do a postdoc at Harvard University and in 2005 joined the Department of Anthropology at Penn. In 2014, Professor Valeggia moved to Yale University where she is a professor in the Department of Anthropology.

Daniel Vargas

Professor of Law
Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV) Rio de Janeiro Law School

Daniel Vargas is a professor of law at FGV Law School in Rio de Janeiro. He holds SJD ‘13 and LL.M. ‘06 degrees from Harvard Law School. Before joining FGV, he served in different positions at the Brazilian Government, including Secretary of Sustainable Development (in charge of public policies in the Brazilian Amazon), Secretary of Strategic Affairs (in charge of developmental policies in the Brazilian Northeast and Center-West regions), Chief of Staff and (interim) Minister of Strategic Affairs. He currently leads the newly created Center on Federalism and Education at FGV Law School, committed to research the legal and institutional challenges to the enhancement of the quality of education in the country.

Sponsored By

MacMillan Center on Latin American and Iberian Studies logo
Yale Office of International Affairs logo
FGV Direito Rio logo
Unesco logo

Ministry of Education

The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund

The Malcolm C. Batchelor Fund of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese