Professor (1994)

Associate Chair

Latin America

Office Hours: TBA

Office: 122 Randall Hall

Phone: (434) 924-6388

Fax: (434) 924-7891

Email: bpo3avirginia.edu

Education

Publications, Awards, and Activities

"Mediating Popular Culture: Race and Nationality as Historical Problem in Brazil," forthcoming.

"Domesticating Modernity: Markets, Home, and Morality in the Middle Class in Rio de Janeiro and São Paolo, 1930s and 1940s," Journal of Urban History 24:3 (March, 1999), 337-63.

Intimate Ironies: Modernity and the Making of Middle-Class Lives in Brazil (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

Dissertation Prize, Princeton University, 1995, for "'Stuck in the Middle': Middle Class and Class Society in Urban Brazil, 1850-1950," Ph.D. Diss., Princeton University, 1994.

Fellow, Woodrow Wilson Princeton Society of Fellows, 1992-93.

Grantee, Mellon Dissertation Grant, 1992-93.

Fulbright-Hays Research Grant (Brazil), 1990-91.

Fulbright-IIE Research Grant (Brazil), 1991-92.

Current Research

A series of twists and turns in my thinking have led me, much to my surprise, from 19th and 20th-century Brazil to 17th-century Mexico. My current achivally-based project, which aims toward a book manuscript, is an effort to uncover something of the "legal culture"--the expectations, values, norms, and attitudes people have toward law and justice--of colonial Mexico. I have in recent years traveled to Spain and Mexico for research. This shift in focus grows out of my sense that the only way to confront Latin America on its own terms, rather than as a "defective" version of European and North American moderity, is to rethink the colonial period in ways that allow historians to draw more nuanced connections between early and modern Latin America. Such a project cannot be limited to empirical research; it requres a firm theoretical grounding as well. Thus, as I read 17th-century leagal cases and law treatises, I am also actively thinking through conceptual issues. I am currently working on a broad argument that explores the abiding sense that Latin America is so often understood in terms of its "lack" and "absense" vis-à-vis Europe and the United States.