Brian P. Owensby
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Professor (1994)
Associate Chair
Latin America; Modern Brazil; Colonial Mexico
Office Hours: Wed. 1200-1300; Thu. 1045-1200
Office: 122 Randall Hall
Phone: (434) 924-6388
Fax: (434) 924-7891
Email:
bpo3a 
virginia.edu
Scholarship
Books
Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, 2008)
Intimate Ironies: Making Middle-Class Lives in Modern Brazil (Stanford, 1999)
Articles
Forthcoming: "Slave Litigants and the Processes of Liberty in Seventeenth-Century New Spain," in "Slavery, Citizenship, and the State in Classicial Antiquity and the Modern Americas," Special Issue of The European Review of History/Revue Europeene d'Histoire, spring 2009
Forthcoming: "Domesticating Modernity: Markets, Home, and Morality in the Middle Class in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paul, 1930s and 1940s," reprinted in The Latin American Middle-Class Reader, David Parker, ed.
Forthcoming: "In the Middle of the Margin," in "We Shall Be All": Toward a Global History of the Middle Class, Mary Kay Vaugh, Barbara Weinstein, Ricardo Lopez, eds.
Forthcoming: "'There Is Nothing Self Interest Cannot Command': A Romance of Early-Modern Mexico," in Race and Gender, Empire and Nation: A Documentary History on the Making of Latin America, Erin O'Conner, ed., 2009
Entry for "Latin American History" in The World Book Encyclopedia, 2007
"How Juan and Leonor Won Their Freedom: Litigation and Liberty in Seventeenth-Century Mexico," Hispanic American Historical Review 85:1 (Feb. 2005): 39-79
"Toward a History of Brazil's 'Cordial Racism'--Race Beyond Liberalism," Comparative Studies in Society and History 47 (2005): 318-47
"Domesticating Modernity: Markets, Home, and Morality in the Middle Class in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, 1930sa nd 1940s," Journal of Urban History 24:3 (Mar. 1998): 337-63
Book reviews in: Law and History Review; Journal of Latin American Anthropology; Hispanic American Historical Review; The Times Literary Supplement; The Business History Review; The Americas; Luso-Brazilian Review
Select Recent Presentations
Invited Conference Paper: "Coridalidade e Modernidade: Problemas e Possibilidades do Pensamento Historico Brasileiro," IV Simposio Internacional de Historia do Brasil (FGV/BRASA), June 2008
Invited Conference paper: "Liberty in Litigation: Toward Microhistories of Process in Slave Freedom Cases, 17th-Century Mexico," Institute for the Study of Slavery, Nottingham University, England, 2006
Scholar in Residence, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, Mar.-Apr. 2006. Delivered three lectures: "Between Disenchantment and Discipline: Cordiality and the Challenge of Modernity in Brazil"; "Slave Autonomy, Liberty, and Popular Culture in the Making of Brazilian National Identity"; "The Protection and Liberty of Subjects: Indian Amparo Petitioners in Early-Modern Mexico"
Invited Panelist: "We Shall Be All: Toward a Global History of the Middle Class," University of Maryland, 2006
Current Work
Having finished the project on litigation in colonial Mexico, I am pursuing two lines of research to advance my ongoing inquiry into the theory and practice of political and social organization in Latin America.
As part of my abiding interest in the epistemological and theoretical issues of thinking historicallly in a Latin American context, I am working on Sergio Buarque de Holanda's Raizes do Brasil, a ground-breaking work of historical theorizing written in Brazil during the 1930s. In this project I am asking questions about the most basic assumptions undergirding historical research into Latin America's social and political thought. I have culled a great deal of material from the Sergio Buarque archive at UNICAMP and plan two or three articles during the next couple of years.
My next book-length project looks toward a reflection on the Jesuit project among indigenous peoples in Spanish and Portuguese South America during the period up to the expulsion of the Society in the 1760s. I see this as a way to ask broad questions about the relationship between the European Enlightenment and Latin America's political and social dilemmas in a period of formative modernity. Here, as in the rest of my work, I remain committed to a panoramic vision of Latin American history, one with space for Latin America's "positividad" (Salazar Bondy), lest we end up with a purely negative story.
Broadly, my work may also be seen as an effort to question fundamental tropes of modernity as applied to Latin America's historical realities. In Intimate Ironies on 19th- and 20th-century Brazil, I probed the "middle class" as an organizing principle of modern social and political order. In Empire of Law I questioned another fundamental trope of modernity, "rule of law." I see these two projects as raising critical questions regarding the dilemmas and possibilities of historical thinking in Latin America. My current work on Buarque de Holanda and on Jesuit-Indigenous communities in 18th-century South America have the same ambition to demonstrate how tightly taken-for-granted notions can constrain our historical imaginations. For, ultimately, every concrete work of history represents an inquiry into the theoretical and practical limits of historical thinking.