After more than 60 years, Vanderbilt’s institutional ties to Brazil are stronger and reach more parts of campus than ever before.

by Kara Furlong

For most who reside as far north of the equator as Nashville, say the word “Brazil” and certain things spring to mind: images of exotic rain forests; the beat of the bossa nova; the colors of Carnival.

But for many on Vanderbilt’s campus, interest in Brazil runs deeper – to a serious study of the nation’s people, politics, economy and history – and reaches back more than 60 years.

When Harvie Branscomb became Vanderbilt’s fourth chancellor in 1946, he brought with him to campus a burgeoning interest in Brazil. A year earlier, while a professor at Duke, Branscomb traveled to Brazil as chair of an American Library Association commission. The visit left him impressed with Brazil both as a country and as the key to South America.

In the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. government celebrated the Allies’ victory by encouraging the academic study of its partners during the war. Branscomb, desiring to transform Vanderbilt from a regional institution to one of national importance, saw an opportunity to put the university on the map. He proposed to the Board of Trust that Vanderbilt establish an institute for the special study of Brazil.

With the help of a five-year Carnegie Corporation grant, in 1947 Vanderbilt founded the Institute for Brazilian Studies, the first of its kind in the nation.

“When Branscomb creates this center in the late ’40s, in many ways there’s nowhere else on the planet that has the kind of concentration in Brazilian studies that we have,” said Marshall Eakin, professor of history. “At that point in the United States, there are very few scholars studying Latin America, much less Brazil.”

So groundbreaking was the institute that no less than Brazilian President Eurico Gaspar Dutra asked to stop at Vanderbilt as part of his official visit to the United States in 1949. The university – and Nashville – rolled out the red carpet for Dutra and his entourage. In addition to ceremonies on campus, Brazilian flags decorated telephone poles in downtown Nashville, and Branscomb arranged for The Tennessean to run on its front page the wire reports for Brazil in Portuguese so that the international visitors could read the news of their country in their native tongue.

Despite such fanfare, in 1952 the Carnegie Corporation decided not to renew its initial grant to the Institute for Brazilian Studies. However, in the five short years of its official existence, the institute established a broad base of faculty expertise that would lead to the creation of Vanderbilt’s Graduate Center for Latin American Studies 10 years later and make the university a leader in Brazil and Latin American studies for years to come.

Universities across the nation soon caught on to this rich field of study begun at Vanderbilt. Latin American studies mushroomed on campuses during the 1950s and especially after 1960, according to Eakin. For its part, Vanderbilt attracted many Brazilians to its Graduate Program in Economic Development and sent scores of graduates back to Brazil where they rose to prominence in government and banking. Also during the ’60s and early ’70s, a number of Vanderbilt professors taught at Brazilian universities in academic exchanges, virtually shaping that country’s post-graduate economic curriculum.

Over the decades, Vanderbilt also trained clusters of Brazilian students in engineering and library science. During the 1980s, the flow of Brazilians to Vanderbilt tapered off due in part to the growing strength of universities within Brazil, in part to the economic crisis in Latin America, Eakin said.

“What happens by the ’90s is you see fewer Brazilian students on campus, but they’re more spread out,” he said. “They’re here in smaller numbers, but they’re studying just about everything you can imagine.”

Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management made a recruiting push in Brazil during the late 1980s and throughout the ’90s. Today, the largest cluster of Brazilians on campus are those seeking an MBA.

Eakin credits C. Enrique Pupo-Walker, Centennial Professor of Spanish, Emeritus, with strengthening Vanderbilt’s Latin American center – eventually renamed the Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies (CLAIS) – around this time. Pupo-Walker’s efforts, as well as the hiring of more faculty with research interests in Brazil, the relocation of the international Brazilian Studies Association to campus, and the awarding of federal grant money to send Vanderbilt students to Brazil for study, have contributed to Vanderbilt’s emergence – along with Brown, UCLA, Texas and Florida – as one of the top five institutions for the study of Brazil in the United States today.

“By the time we arrive at 2008, even though we’ve had this long tradition in Brazilian studies, in some ways we’ve grown much stronger in the last 10 years,” Eakin said. “There’s a diversity now that spans across different schools, affects different types of faculty, and interests different types of students.”

Central to this – and to the success of any Brazilian program – is placing an emphasis on the study of Portuguese. “The single biggest obstacle to developing Brazilian studies in the United States is language,” Eakin said. “To put it in perspective, about 600,000 college students are enrolled in Spanish classes every semester – that’s two-thirds of all foreign-language enrollment in the United States. By contrast, only around 8,000 are studying Portuguese.” Vanderbilt has three full-time Portuguese professors, a rarity among North American universities. Only three or four other schools in the country have as many, Eakin said.

Such training in Portuguese is a wise investment, said Ted Fischer, professor of anthropology and the current director of the CLAIS. Fischer recalled an alumnus from Brazil, now an executive for Shell, who recently spoke on campus. “He told our students, ‘If you want to make money, learn Portuguese.’ It’s a huge market in the United States, it’s wide open, and if you speak it – even if you’re not fluent – it’s going to open all sorts of doors for you in the private sector.”

In countless ways, Vanderbilt is a more international institution now than when it forged initial ties with Brazil in the late 1940s. With so many academic, research and recruiting interests around the globe, why should Vanderbilt continue to pay Brazil so much attention?

“When you look at Latin America, the two places that stand out because of scale are Mexico and Brazil,” Eakin said. “I always say that Mexico’s the most important country in Latin America for the United States – largely because we share a 2,000-mile border – but Brazil is the most important country in Latin America.”

Brazil is the world’s fifth-largest nation in terms of geographical area, its fifth-largest population, its fourth-most-populous democracy and its 10th-largest economy.

Given its scale and Vanderbilt’s history there, the administration’s desire to maintain strong ties with Brazil is logical, Eakin said. “My guess is when Harvie Branscomb came back from Brazil in 1946, he had all of this in mind. You can almost hear him saying, ‘This is the country of the future.’”

“There are so many things that link Brazil’s past with the U.S. past – plantation systems, slavery, unequal regional development. So from an historian’s point of view, it’s an obvious connection,” said Jane Landers, associate professor of history, who co-directs a project with historian Mariza Soares of the Universidade Federal Fluminense to digitize and preserve the oldest black church records in Rio de Janeiro.

“But Brazil is also interesting to sociologists, anthropologists, archeologists, political scientists. With heavily black populations in both countries, those in medicine are also looking at certain diseases and health problems associated with African-Americans in both places.”

When Landers directed the CLAIS, she won a Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) grant from the U.S. Department of Education to facilitate the study of race, economic development and social inequality in Brazil. Along with Howard University, Vanderbilt established a consortium with the Universidade de São Paulo and the Universidade Federal da Bahia in Brazil for curricular development and student exchanges. With that program now ended, Vanderbilt has entered a second FIPSE consortium with Fisk University, the Universidade Federal da Bahia and the Universidade Federal de Rio Grande do Sul. Landers and Eakin co-direct the FIPSE programs at Vanderbilt.

Under these grants, 10 Vanderbilt graduate students have studied in Brazil, and similar Brazilian funding has brought 15 Brazilian undergraduates to Vanderbilt. However, their coming here would not be possible without additional support from Vanderbilt’s administration, Landers said.

“(Arts and Science Dean) Richard McCarty helped launch this program and has made a serious commitment to bringing minority students from Brazil to campus. He and (Dean of Students) Mark Bandas have waived all housing costs for these deserving students,” she said. The Brazilian students live in McTyeire International House and are able to put the small federal stipends they receive toward travel and other expenses while in the United States.

Another boon for Brazilian students coming to campus – and for Brazilianists everywhere – is the Vanderbilt library’s vast holdings of Brazilian volumes, collected steadily since 1947.

“If you look around the United States, again there are probably four or five places that have the best collections on Brazil, and we’re one of them,” Eakin said. “When Brazilians come here it’s a real revelation to them that they can find works they would never find at their own universities.”

Also drawing Brazilian scholars to campus is Vanderbilt’s serving as the home of the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA) since 2004. Eakin serves as BRASA’s executive director.

“We have a conference every other year, with the membership being about half Brazilian, half from the U.S.,” he said. “In all of BRASA’s publicity going out across the Americas, the organization is synonymous with Vanderbilt. So BRASA has given us enormous visibility within Brazil and the Brazilian studies community.”

Fischer, the CLAIS director, said his center’s mission is to be similarly recognizable on the Vanderbilt campus and in the surrounding community.

“We’ve recently been designated by the Department of Education as a national resource center,” Fischer said. “What that means is we are one of about 10 or 15 centers around the country serving as a resource for the medical, legal and K-12 educational communities.”

In addition to offering its own master’s certificate in Latin American studies, the CLAIS serves other graduate programs on campus.

“We provide summer grants for students to learn Portuguese or other native languages. We provide pre-dissertation seed money for them to do their work. And we really encourage students to reach out beyond their departments,” Fischer said.

The center is working on a project now that will connect students at Owen and researchers at Vanderbilt’s Institute for Global Health with business students in São Paulo to set up economic development centers near HIV clinics in Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony.

“Many times the medical school or business school or engineering will have the technical expertise needed to get these projects done, but it helps so much to know the language, with whom to speak and how to speak to them,” Fischer said. “We can provide these sorts of perspectives.”

The CLAIS also is educating closer to home.

“We have a massive outreach program that’s mostly oriented toward kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers from Metro Nashville schools, the state and neighboring states as well,” Fischer said. “For instance, we recently brought the Vanderbilt Institute for Coffee Studies over from the Department of Psychiatry in the medical school – it’s now part of Latin American Studies. Rather than looking just at the biochemical aspects of coffee, we’re looking at the history, sociology and economic development aspects surrounding this bean that we’re all so fascinated with.”

The center has held workshops on coffee, the tango, the ancient Maya, the Mexican Revolution and other subjects to make Latin American studies relevant to educators. “We bring these teachers in, expose them to first-rate scholars doing cutting-edge work, and animate them to go back to the classroom and introduce some of these international themes to their students.”

In October, Vanderbilt hosted Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Brazilian president from 1995 to 2003, to celebrate 60 years of institutional ties with Brazil. In many ways, the event brought full circle the mission Branscomb initiated some six decades earlier. But the CLAIS – and the rate at which Vanderbilt continues to build relationships with Brazil and throughout Latin America – shows no signs of slowing down.

“We’re going great guns,” Fischer said. “It’s a program with a long and illustrious history, but with the designation as a national resource center in 2006, it’s just over the top.
“In recruiting graduate students for our own program and other programs on campus, in recruiting faculty, Vanderbilt has stormed up the national stage in terms of Latin American and Brazilian studies.”

For more information about Brazilian projects and programs at Vanderbilt, visit www.vanderbilt.edu/clais.

Posted 01/01/08