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

Rosental Alves
Professor, School of Journalism; Director, Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas
Interests: Foreign correspondence; online journalism; communication; freedom of the press
 

Patience Epps
Professor, Department of Linguistics
Interests: Amazonia; indigenous languages; language documentation; historical linguistics; prehistory
 

Wendy Hunter
Professor, Department of Government
Interests: Social policy issues in Latin America; politics of education and health reform
 

Marcelo J. P. Paixão
Associate Professor, LLILAS and Department of African & African Diaspora Studies
PhD, Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro (IUPERJ)
Interests: Race relations and inequalities in Brazil and Latin American; public policies issues and monitoring; models of socioeconomic development; labor market; statistics of race, ethnic, and gender inequality

Paloma Diaz
Scholarly Programs 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.