Thursday, April 13, 2017
7:00pm – 9:00pm
Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute
Joel Wolfe will give the Thomas Skidmore Memorial Lecture this Thursday from 7-9pm in the Joukowsky Forum at the Watson Institute. His talk, "O Grande Brasil: A Spatial History of the Making of a Nation," reinterprets modern Brazilian history by using geography as its starting point. He will discuss how almost every key event, practice, and social arrangement in Brazil was fundamentally shaped by the nation's massive size.
Joel Wolfe is professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His work studies the impact of modernity, industrialism, and trade on Latin American societies and their politics. His primary focus is modern Brazil. His most recent publication was Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity (Oxford 2010). He also published Working Women, Working Men: São Paulo and the Rise of Brazil's Industrial Working Class, 1900-1955 (Duke 1993). He is currently writing a history of trade in the Americas, tentatively titled, "The Global Twenties: Trade and Society in the Western Hemisphere in the 1920s." He was Thomas Skidmore's advisee at the University of Wisconsin Madison.