Brazil Center Faculty Committee
Director
Seth Garfield
Seth Garfield, professor in the Department of History, serves as director of the LLILAS Benson Brazil Center. He was previously the director of the Institute for Historical Studies in the Department of History and the undergraduate faculty adviser at LLILAS.
Garfield earned his PhD from Yale University and has taught at the University of Texas since 2001. His areas of interest include indigenous peoples, the environment, and commodity studies. He is the author of Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil: State Policy, Frontier Expansion and the Xavante Indians, 1937–1988 (Duke University Press, 2001), published in Portuguese by Editora Unesp (2011) as A luta indígena no coração do Brasil: política indigenista, a Marcha para o Oeste e os índios xavante (1937–1988). His second monograph, In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region (Duke, 2013), received Honorary Mention for the Bolton-Johnson Prize from the American Historical Association’s Conference on Latin American History. Garfield has published articles on Brazilian history in the Hispanic American Historical Review, the Journal of Latin American Studies, and the Revista Brasileira de História, and currently serves as the associate editor of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Brazilian History and Culture. He is presently at work on a history of guaraná, an indigenous cultivar and namesake of Brazil’s “national” soda.
Committee Members
Eugenio Arima
Associate Professor, Department of Geography and the Environment
Interests: Human–enivronment interactions; land change science; GIS science; applied quantitative methods
Lorraine Leu
Professor, LLILAS and Department of Spanish & Portuguese
Interests: Urban Brazil; racialized geographies; visual culture; cultural theory
Adele Nelson
Assistant Professor, Department of Art & Art History
Interests: Modern and contemporary art in Latin America; Brazilian art history
Paloma Diaz
Assistant Director and Faculty Liaison, LLILAS Benson
Interests: Development and coordination of international conferences in the Americas; promotion of scholarship through social media; higher education
LLILAS Brazilianist Faculty
Brazilianist Faculty
LLILAS is richly endowed with expertise in Brazil-related topics, with roughly 50 faculty members spread across most of the university's school and colleges.
To learn about LLILAS faculty working on Brazilian issues, visit LLILAS Brazilianist Faculty.
