Brazil's Steel City: Developmentalism, Strategic Power, and Industrial Relations in Volta Redonda, 1941-1964

I am a professor of History at Duke University with a econdary appointment in African and African American Studies\. With a B.A. from Amherst College, I received my doctorate at Yale in 1985 under Brazilian historian Emília Viotti da Costa (1928-2017). Since 1979, I have been studying class, race, gender, and politics in Brazil, Latin America, and beyond with 48 refereed articles as well as numerous chapters, briefing books, interviews, blog posts, and reviews.

RESEARCH FOR NEW BOOK: Over the last two years I have been working on a book about the photojournalists that covered the massive metalworkers strikes of 1979-1980 in the ABC region of Sāo Paulo. Undertaken during a military dictatorship, these strikes were marked by a sequence of eighteen unprecedented plebiscitary assemblies of between 15-70,000 workers held in a local soccer stadium and public squares. It was these rallies that catapulted Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s current third term president (2002-2010, 2023-), to national and international prominence.  Putting to one side the figure of Lula, whose role is examined in my 2020 biography. this book will focus attention on the tens of thousands of attendees and what we can learn that is new from a serious study of the negative sequences that I currently have in my possession.

Entitled “‘Pure Photojournalism’? Event, Truth, and Narrative in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 1979-1980,” this book is a collaborative project based on the scanning of 4800 negatives of these events, less than half of one percent of which have ever been shown or published, whether at that time or later.  It was launched publicly in a June 2025 event at the state headquarters of the Union of Professional Journalists in Sāo Paulo, Their newspaper, Unity, published a 5800 word story by Pedro Pomar on the event on 8 July, 2025.

FINISHED BOOK MANUSCRIPT UNDER REVIEW: Ruling Racial Quotas Constitutional in Brazil: How Black Movements Achieved a Resounding and Enduring Affirmative Action Victory in the Supreme Court and Legislature, co-authored with Drs. Silvio Almeida, Travis Knoll, Waleska Miguel Batista, and Thaís Zappelini is currently under review at two university presses.

PRIZES, ACCLAIM, & GRANT SUPPORT FOR MY LAST PUBLISHED MONOGRAPH (2020/2022):  My October 2020 UNC Press monograph entitled Lula and his Politics of Cunning: From Metalworker to President of Brazil was awarded two prizes in 2021: the Sérgio Buarque de Holanda Prize from the Brazil Section of the Latin American Studies Association and the Warren Dean Memorial Prize of the Conference on Latin American History. The book has been the subject of five roundtables with contributions from twenty-one senior scholars across several disciplines: Labor: Studies in Working Class History (September 2021); American Historical Review (December 2021); Latin American Politics & Society (February 2022); International Review of Social History (2022), and the Brazilian Mundos do Trabalho (2023).

Reviewed widely, it has also been the subject of five podcasts and the Brazilian translations was published in September 2020 by Editora Expressāo Popular as Lula e a Politica de Astùcia: De Metalúrgico ao Presidente do Brasil. A detailed consideration of the methodological and theoretical lineage of the book appeared as a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Latin American Studies in the U.K.

My Lula book was supported by numerous external grants competitive and fellowships including” American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Social Science Research Council in 1991; the National Humanities Center (1995-96), American Philosophical Society (1999), and Fulbright-Hays Fellowship (2000); and residential fellowships at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2015-16) and the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame for Spring (2007)..\

EARLIER MONOGRAPHS: My earlier books include The Brazilian Workers ABC (1992/1995 in Brazil), Drowning in Laws: Labor Law and Brazilian Political Culture (2004; 2002 in Brazil), and a coedited volume The Gendered Worlds of Latin American Women Workers (1997)

SERVICE & COMMUNITY OUTREACH: I have over the years served as Director of the Duke's Latin American Center and the Carolina-Duke Consortium, Treasurer of our national interdisciplinary organization LASA, and co-editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review for a five-year term that ended in June 2017. 

Over the past twelve years, I have served as co-director of the Duke Brazil Initiative (2013-2025), the Global Brazil Humanities Lab of the Franklin Humanities Institute (2014-17), and as faculty co-director of three related Duke Bass Connections Projects on "The Cost of Opportunity: Social Mobility and Higher Education in Rio's Baixada Fluminense,” (2015-2019),  “Hip Hop Pedagogies: Education for Citizenship in Brazil & the United States (2023-2024),” Hip Hop Pedagogies: Education for Citizenship in Brazil & the United States (2023-2024),” and Activism, Culture and Education for Citizenship in Brazil and the U.S. (2024-2025).

TEACHING, In the spring of 2020, I co-taught a course on "Black Lives Matter Brazil/USA" with Mellon visiting professor Dr. Silvio Almeida of Mackenzie Presbyterian University/FGV in Sao Paulo that led to an ongoing student project that produced a remarkable BLM Brazil-USA website as well as a West Campus graduation poster display and an exhibit in the John Hope Franklin Gallery of the History Department in Classroom Building on Duke’s East campus .

My past doctoral advisees have completed dissertations on Bolivia, Brazil (3), Chile, Jamaica & Trinidad and Tobago, Peru, Venezuela, early modern Spain, and southeastern pacific marine environmental history. My graduate teaching includes the "Modern Latin American History" colloquium, a two-semester sequence on "Afro-Brazilian History and Culture," "The Latin American Wars of Independence," and “Global Critical Race Theory and History.” Over the years, I have directed numerous undergraduate theses in a variety of disciplines, eight of which won prizes.

My undergraduate offerings include surveys of Brazilian and Modern Latin American history while my newest offering focuses on the political and military history of the Latin American Wars of Independence. My newest course in the fall of 2025 is “History and Photography: Dictatorships and Resistance in Latin America.”