Vanderbilt has a long tradition of interest in Brazil's people, culture, economy, and history.  This interest began after World War II, when the Carnegie Foundation awarded a cooperative grant to Vanderbilt University, Tulane University, the University of Texas, and the University of North Carolina to create centers for the study of Latin America. Vanderbilt used that money to establish an Institute for Brazilian Studies in 1947 and Brazil's President Eurico Dutra came to Nashville for the official launching of the Institute.  In the 1950s and 1960s the Institute broadened its scope eventually becoming the Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies (CLAIS). 

Today a wide variety of programs, departments and centers in the College of Arts and Science support Brazilian studies.  CLAIS is a federally-funded Title VI National Resource Center with Foreign Languate Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships for the study of Portuguese during the academic year and summer.  It also has a FIPSE-CAPES consortium grant in conjunction with Howard University, the Universidade de São Paulo, and the Universidade Federal da Bahia focused on “Race, Development, Social Inequality, and Access to Higher Education.”  With a group of Brazilianists in the departments of Anthropology, Economics, History, Sociology, and Spanish and Portuguese, Vanderbilt University has one of the strongest concentrations of Brazilianists of any university in the United States.

The Latin American collection in the Vanderbilt library, especially the Brazilian studies collection, is among the finest in the country. 

Tony Brown, Assistant Professor of Sociology, has conducted research on the connections between race and poverty in Brazil and delivered a series of lectures on his research in May, 2004, at Brazilian universities. tony.n.brown@vanderbilt.edu

Celso Castilho, Research Assistant Professor of History, is at work on a book manuscript entitled Remaking Nation and Citizenship in Northeastern Brazil: The Politics of Antislavery in Pernambuco, 1866-1893. His work analyzes the dynamics and effects of antislavery mobilization on the politics of slave emancipation, and examines the creation and ramifications of an “official” memory of abolition in the early years of the old republic. 

Beth Conklin, Associate Professor of Anthropology, continues to receive international attention for her book Consuming Grief:  Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Community (2001).  Articles about her work have appeared over the past year in Science Illustrated (Sweden), GEO Magazine (Germany and Korea), Der Spiegel (Germany), TV7 Magazine (England), The San Francisco Examiner, The Toronto Globe & Mail, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. beth.a.conklin@vanderbilt.edu

Marshall C. Eakin, Professor of History and former Chair of Vanderbilt’s Department of History, was awarded the Order of Rio Branco at the Brazilian Embassy in Washington, DC in September 2002.  Professor Eakin’s research focuses on 19^th and 20^th-century Brazil, especially the history of industrialization and nation-building.  His publications include British Enterprise in Brazil: The St. John d'el Rey Mining Company and the Morro Velho Gold Mine, 1830-1960 (Duke, 1989), Brazil: The Once and Future Country (St. Martin's, 1997) and Tropical Capitalism: The Industrialization of Belo Horizonte, Brazil (Palgrave, 2001). Professor Eakin is the executive director of the Brazilian Studies Association. marshall.c.eakin@vanderbilt.edu

Earl Fitz, Professor of Portuguese and Spanish at Vanderbilt has published widely reviewed works on Brazil including Sexuality and Being in the Poststructuralist Universe of Clarice Lispector:  The Différance of Desire (2001), Ambiguity and Gender in the New Novel of Spanish America and Brazil (1993), Rediscovering the New World: Inter-American Literature in a Comparative Context (1991), Machado de Assis (1989), and Clarice Lispector (1985). His research focuses on Brazilian narrative and poetry, comparative studies between Brazil and Spanish-America, inter-American literature, ambiguity and gender in the New Novel of Latin America, Modernism in the Americas, and colonial literature.  earl.e.fitz@vanderbilt.edu

Tom Gregor, Professor of Anthropology, is currently completing a book on peaceful relations among tribes in Central Brazil and a co-edited volume comparing the cultures of Amazonia and Melanesia. Professor Gregor is author of Mehinaku: The Drama of Daily Life in a Brazilian Indian Village (1977) and Anxious Pleasures: The Sexual Lives of an Amazonian People (1985).  His edited books include A Natural History of Peace and The Anthropology of Peace and Nonviolence.  He has worked as a film maker for the BBC, Grenada Television and NET in making the television films Mehinaku, We are Mehinaku, Feathered Arrows and Dreams from the Forest. thomas.a.gregor@vanderbilt.edu

Stephen Heyneman, Professor of International Educational Policy, Leadership and      Organizations, Peabody College; Formerly with World Bank. s.heyneman@Vanderbilt.Edu

Carlos Jáuregui, Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, researches colonial and post colonial literature and culture of Brazil and Spanish America. His work focuses on the symbolic dimensions and historical redefinitions of the metaphor of cannibalism. He examines the symbolic disjunction between heroic and cannibal images of Brazilian Indians in cartographic and ethnographic representations and in monuments, coins, street-names, and romantic novels. He is currently working on cultural whitening in two Brazilian operas by Carlos Gomes: O Guaraní (1889)—based on the novel with the same title by José de Alencár (1870) — and Lo Schiavo (“O escravo”) and on the Antropofagia movement elaborated in the late 1920s by the modernist writer Oswald de Andrade, and its impact in Brazilian theatre, popular music, cinema, and art. carlos.jauregui@Vanderbilt.Edu

Jane Landers, Associate Professor of History, former Associate Dean, College of Arts & Science and former director of the Center for Latin American & Iberian Studies, researches comparative slavery and race relations in Brazil and the circum-Caribbean. She has presented her work at conferences in Salvador and Rio de Janeiro and her essays are being translated into Portuguese for publication in Brazilian journals. She is the primary investigator on a two year National Endowment for the Humanities Grant “Ecclesiastical Sources and Historical Research on the African Diaspora in Brazil and Cuba” http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/ecclesiasticalsources and also on the FIPSE/CAPES student exchange grant linking Vanderbilt to Howard University, the Universidade Federal da Bahia, and the University of Sao Paulo. jane.landers@vanderbilt.edu

James Lang, emeritus Professor of Sociology, and past director of the Center for Latin American & Iberian Studies, has published several important books on Brazil including Portuguese Brazil: The King’s Plantation (1979) and Inside Development: A Report from the Dominican republic, Colombia and Brazil (1988). He has also been instrumental in developing interest in Brazilian studies at the McTyeire International House. james.j.lang@vanderbilt.edu

Andrea Maneschi, Professor of Economics. Professor Maneschi is responsible for much of the early success of the Brazilian Institute at Vanderbilt. He trained many of the Brazilian students who came to Vanderbilt and returned to become leading economists in Brazil. andrea.maneschi@vanderbilt.edu

Peter Martin, Professor of Psychiatry and Pharmacology, Director Addiction Center & Division Addiction Medicine & Institute for Coffee Studies. AA-2206 MCN peter.martin@vanderbilt.edu

Emanuelle Oliveira, Assistant Professor of Luso-Brazilian Literature researches Brazilian literature and cinema and Afro-Brazilian Literature. Professor Oliveira hosts the Portuguese language dinner table at McTyeire International House and a very popular “bate-papo” or conversation at Starbucks. She has lectured widely in Brazil and in the United states on topics such as images of black criminality in film and popular music. She is also translating the videos for the FIPSE common curriculum course on “Race, Development and Social Inequality.”emanuelle.oliveira@vanderbilt.edu

Lori Sciadini, senior Lecturer in Spanish and Portuguese and former Director of Overseas Studies.  Sciadini established the Vanderbilt CIEE program in Sao Paulo, Brazil. lorraine.c.sciadini@vanderbilt.edu

The Latin American collection at the Vanderbilt University Libraries is one of its major strengths.  The longstanding geographic focus has been on the Brazilian collection.  The Colombian collection has also been a traditional strength with many unique resources and, more recently, an emphasis has been given to Mesoamerican anthropology and archaeology.  Special Collections houses eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts of travel and exploration in Latin America.  

The Latin American collection is particularly strong in nineteenth-century Brazilian history; that has been an area of targeted growth since the establishment of the first Institute of Brazilian Studies in the U.S. at Vanderbilt in 1947.  Exchanges of materials were established early on with government agencies, libraries, and institutes throughout Brazil as a result of Chancellor Harvie Branscomb's visits to Brazil and the visit of President Eurico Dutra to Vanderbilt.  Over time, book purchase trips to Brazil by the faculty and the Latin American Bibliographer as well as approval plans and cooperative arrangements with institutions have enhanced the collection.  NEH, Mellon and Tinker grants have allowed us to purchase many primary resources (e.g., 865 volumes of the 19^th-century British Foreign Office correspondence with Brazil) and a number of scholars have given their private libraries (e.g., Alexander Marchant, Emilio Willems).  The Marchant collection also includes Brazilian photographs and a Brazilian coin collection and is housed in Special Collections.  Most recently, a donor has given a collection of Brazilian art books, exhibition catalogs, and political and artistic posters.  

We look forward to your visit to the Library while you are here. If you would like a quick introduction to the resources or have a specific research interest, I’ll be happy to meet with you.    

Paula Covington

Latin American and Iberian Bibliographer

Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies

paula.covington@vanderbilt.edu