Dr. Andrew G. Britt (PhD, ’18) has published his first book, I’ll Samba Someplace Else: A Spatial History of Race, Ethnicity, and Displacement in São Paulo, with Duke University Press. Someplace Else charts the interwoven history of three of the city’s most iconic neighborhoods, popularly known as “African” Brasilândia, “Japanese” Liberdade, and “Italian” Bela Vista. Drawing on granular archival research, historical GIS, and sustained engagement with African-descendent cultural organizations in São Paulo, Britt demonstrates how the mid-twentieth-century construction of these neighborhoods served both to reproduce racial inequities and bolster discourses of multicultural harmony.
Mural by artist JOKS in São Paulo’s Brasilândia neighborhood.
Barbara Weinstein, Silver Professor of History at New York University, offered the following praise: “Andrew Britt has given us a remarkable book. By combining the latest digital tools with a trove of archival and oral sources, he enables us to see the city of São Paulo from entirely new angles.”
Britt is Assistant Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He completed his doctoral training in 2018 under the advisement of Drs. Jeffrey Lesser and Thomas D. Rogers.
The Emory News Center recently published a feature story about the research led by Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History, in the Bom Retiro neighborhood of São Paulo, Brazil. Headlined “Understanding health, history and environment in urban Brazil,” the piece highlights the innovative methods that inform Lesser’s work, including for his most recent book, Living and Dying in São Paulo: Immigrants, Health, and the Built Environment in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2025). The article also describes the productive cross-disciplinary collaborations that Lesser has cultivated with graduate and undergraduate students, including second-year doctoral student Paula Manfredini and History honors student Lucia Alexeyev.
Find an excerpt of the piece below, and read the full article.
“Lesser, who frequently visits the neighborhood accompanied by student researchers who are just as likely to be medical, theology or public health scholars as history majors, researches the historical dimensions of how health problems arise — not just via germs or disease, but also from the many different ways people live their daily lives within the urban environment. This unusual approach brings his team into contact with a wide variety of individuals who shape public health, including policymakers, street-level health teams and and ordinary people from diverse backgrounds.
‘Being a historian is a great way to be left alone,’ says Lesser, the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Latin American History at Emory. ‘But I started to realize I would be a better scholar if I was surrounded by people who had different expertise than my own, who challenged me as opposed to my doing it all in my own head.‘”
Bruna Digiacomo Cerveira, fourth-year doctoral candidate in Latin American history, received the 2026 Beveridge Family Research Grant in Western Hemisphere History from the American Historical Association. The grant will support research for her dissertation project, “Liberated African Children Between Empires: Slavery, Freedom, and British Imperialism in Rio de Janeiro, 1831–1888.” Cerveira is among just eleven graduate students in history nationwide to receive the AHA’s Beveridge grant this cycle. Her dissertation is advised by Drs. Mariana P. Candido and Thomas D. Rogers.
Doctoral student Alejandro Guardado won the Albert J. Beveridge grant from the American Historical Association for his research project, “Reimagining Community: Indigenous Organizing in Mexico’s Neoliberal Turn, 1968–2000.” Guardado’s dissertation centers on Self Determination Movements in Zapotec and Mixe communities in the Sierra Norte of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. He analyzes how Indigenous intellectuals and activists developed networks with micro-regional political coalitions, anthropologists, liberation theologians, and NGOs as a means of renegotiating their relationship to the Mexican government and market forces.
The Beveridge grants support research in the history of the Western Hemisphere, and Guardado was among just 15 graduate students nationwide selected for the prize. Dr. Yanna Yannakis, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History and Department Chair, serves as Guardado’s dissertation advisor.
In the summer of 2025, Emory College senior Lucia Alexeyev conducted research about the relationship between U.S. Naval occupation and residents’ health and access to healthcare on the island of Vieques in Puerto Rico. Alexeyev’s project, titled “Military Occupation and Changing Healthcare Landscapes: Vieques and the U.S. Navy, 1941-2003,” was funded by the History Department’s Cuttino Scholarship for Independent Research Abroad.
Alexeyev is a History major and Global Health, Culture and Society minor. Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History, serves as her thesis adviser. Read an excerpt from the Nueve Millones piece below and find the full article here.
“Even with how politics has changed in the EPA, Estrada Martinez remains hopeful for the study’s completion. She’s inspired by the Viequense community’s 63-year struggle to remove the Navy from the island, plus an additional 20-year battle to obtain funding for VASAC in the first place. ‘This is just a rock on the road, and we will figure out together how to get rid of it and move forward, right?‘”
Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History, published Living and Dying in São Paulo: Immigrants, Health, and the Built Environment in Brazil with Duke University Press in the spring of 2025. Editora UNESP recently released the Portuguese-language version, Viver e morrer em São Paulo: Imigração, saúde e infraestrutura urbana (século XIX até o presente). Focused on São Paulo’s Bom Retiro neighborhood, Living and Dying examines competing visions of well-being in Brazil among racialized immigrants and policymakers and health officials. Jerry Dávila, who holds the Jorge Paulo Lemann Chair in Brazilian History at the University of Illinois, describes Lesser’s book as “methodologically innovative, conceptually powerful, and engagingly written.” Both the English-language and Portuguese-language versions will have open access editions thanks to a tome (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Emory University.
In the Q&A below, Dr. Lesser gives us a glimpse into the making of the monograph as part of the History Department’s New Books series.
Books are produced over years if not decades. Give us a sense for the lifespan of this book, from initial idea to final edits.
Living and Dying was conceived about a decade ago during a very boring meeting of department chairs and administrators. Fortunately, I was sitting in the back of the room with the bad kids, including Uriel Kitron, at the time chair of the Department of Environmental Sciences. As we discussed our mutual research interests in Brazil, we began to think of a project on the relation between immigration and health. It did not take long for us to jointly teach an interdisciplinary seminar on the topic and arrange a grant to bring some students in that class to Brazil. Starting about 5 years ago, I was able to arrange regular funding for what became the Lesser Research Collective, an interdisciplinary group of students from Emory and UNIFESP in São Paulo. While we all work in the São Paulo neighborhood of Bom Retiro, on questions related broadly to health, we do so via individual projects and then we meet weekly to share our research.
What was the research process like?
Living and Dying reflects the many approaches that I use to generate and analyze data. Like many in the humanities, I spent most of my career thinking of myself as a solitary researcher even while acknowledging the help of archivists, librarians, and students. For this project, however, I worked with three interconnected teams whose data, ideas, and conclusions influence every sentence of this book. The research is informed by disciplines including history, cultural studies, public health, anthropology, geography, and sociology.
I used a variety of historical and contemporary sources, including archives, observation, oral histories, cartography, digital map creation, photographic exhibits, and participation in city-sponsored health programs. Much of the material was found in the archives of the Emílio Ribas Public Health Museum, situated in the building that had been São Paulo’s Central Disinfectory, and the archival and historical space became an actor in the interpretation of some of the documents.
I used the Pauliceia 2.0 Historical Geographic Information Systems Platform to link quantitative data (e.g., demography, infrastructure planning, health outcomes, and socioenvironmental challenges) to the built environment, especially in order to see continuities in spatial patterns over time. I often matched the quantitative data with blueprints, architects’ notes, street notes, and press reports to map contemporary human flows through and around the buildings, which I then compared with photographs and etchings from earlier periods. My own observations and oral histories emerged from multiple years embedded in a primary care team at the Bom Retiro Public Health Clinic.
Are you partial to a particular chapter or section?
I loved writing “Unliving Rats and Undead Immigrants” because it gave me a chance to treat zombies and ghosts as serious historical actors. The chapter analyzes why public health officials targeted Bom Retiro and its residents during the turn-of-the-century bubonic plague and 1918 influenza outbreaks. I show how the two epidemics led to similar discourses from health officials, often targeting immigrants. The immigrant working classes responded to the two events in similar ways as well, ranging from using popular medicinal practices for care and cure, to rising from the dead to wander to and from Bom Retiro. The chapter also analyzes how a public health campaign to buy rats during the late 19th century Bubonic Flu outbreak led to surprising (from the perspective of officials) responses from the public, like breeding rats or collecting them outside of the city and then bringing them to the Ministry of Health for sale.
How does this project align with your broad research agenda at this point in time?
My beloved advisor and mentor, the later Warren Dean, always argued that we should try to change our research agenda after each book. While in some ways I have rejected his advice (I am broadly interested in Brazil, ethnicity, and national identity) I have taken to heart his broad position, writing about topics as different as armed guerilla organizations, ethnic militancy, and public health. One idea I have for next book is to write the history of modern Brazil via the story of the Corinthians football team (the greatest in the universe!), which was founded in Bom Retiro by English railroad workers in the early twentieth century and whose captain, Socrates, would lead a movement called Corinthian democracy, against the dictatorship in the 1970s.
Doctoral student Ursula Rall has won a fellowship for at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is working on her dissertation, entitled “Forging Inter-Urban Communities: Spatial Mobilities and Social Networks of Women of African Descent in New Spain, 1580-1740.” Drawing on research in Spain and Mexico, the project explores how the social networks that Black women formed across urban centers were key to the socioeconomic mobility of the Black Mexican population during the seventeenth century. She argues that Afro-descended women had a sense of a shared racialized and gendered community, forming close ties and financial networks that improved their social and material lives.
Rall’s research has been supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research Abroad Grant, the American Historical Association, the Forum on Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions, the Conference on Latin American History, and Emory University’s Halle Institute for Global Research. Dr. Yanna Yannakakis, Professor and Department Chair, is Rall’s faculty advisor.
Dr. Adriana Chira, Associate Professor of Atlantic World History, has been named Winship Distinguished Professor of History (effective September 1, 2025). Chira’s research and teaching specializations include: Atlantic history; Cuba in world history; race; slavery and the law; land tenure and property; and post-emancipation. This prestigious appointment recognizes Chira’s scholarly eminence and contributions to Emory’s mission.
Chira’s first book, Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba’s Plantation (Cambridge University Press, Afro-Latin America Series, 2022), focuses on enslaved and free Afro-descendants’ efforts to own landed property and to attain free legal status through claims to ownership filed inside first instance and appellate courts in Cuba during the nineteenth century. The book traces the political implications of these processes, arguing for a history of emancipation that pays attention to vernacular legalism and modes of claiming property. The project is based on extensive archival research within Cuba (in Havana and Santiago de Cuba) and Spain.
Patchwork Freedoms received the Outstanding First Book Prize from the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora, the James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic World History from the American Historical Association, the Peter Gonville Stein Prize for best book in non-US legal history from the American Society for Legal History, and the Elsa Goveia Prize for excellence in Caribbean history from the Association of Caribbean Historians. It has also received honorable mentions from the Latin American Studies Association (the Nineteenth Century Section) and from the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Section of the Southern Historical Association.
Chira has also authored multiple acclaimed scholarly articles, including:
“Freedom with Local Bonds: Custom and Manumission in the Age of Emancipation,” The American Historical Review 126.3 (September), 949-977
“Ampliando los significados de sevicia: Los reclamos de protección corporal de los esclavos en la Cuba del siglo XIX,” Páginas: Revista Digital de la Escuela de Historia de la Universidad de Rosario (Argentina) no. 33 (Sept./Oct.): https://revistapaginas.unr.edu.ar/index.php/RevPaginas/article/view/546
“Affective Debts: Manumission by Grace and the Making of Gradual Emancipation Laws in Cuba, 1817-1868,” Law and History Review 36.1 (winter), 1-33.
Chira teaches a range of thematic and placed-based courses, from “Human Trafficking in World History” to “History Lab: Puerto Rico.” She also created an Emory study abroad program in Cuba, which focuses on questions of food sovereignty and environmental history, that usually takes place during the Maymester semester.
Students and faculty on Cuba study abroad trip, 2024
Chira’s research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and by residential fellowships at Yale University (at the Agrarian Studies Center) and at Harvard University (with the Weatherhead Initiative in Global History).
Jessica Alvarez Starr, a first-year PhD student, will be serving as an intern with the Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration (PRAC) Summer 2025 Graduate Student Internship Program. As part of this 8-week program, Jessica will gain valuable exposure to collections in the Archivo General de Puerto Rico (AGPR) and the University of Puerto Rico’s Colección Puertorriqueña (CPR). Jessica will work alongside archivists to aid in organizing, transcribing, and digitizing efforts for the AGPR while developing their own research project on enslavement and emancipation practices in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. As an intern, Jessica will receive a stipend to cover travel and living costs for their work in San Juan. They are grateful for the opportunity to conduct archival research, gain preservation skills, and develop connections with scholars to advance their studies. Read more information about the PRAC internship. Their dissertation, tentatively titled “Revolutionary Rhetoric: Antislavery and Anticolonial Alliances in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico,” is advised by Drs. Adriana Chira and Yanna Yannakakis.
In the summer of 2024, History PhD student Ashley Tan received funding from Emory’s Tam Institute for Jewish Studies to conduct research on Jewish communities in East and Southeast Asia. He wrote a reflection on his summer experience, which includes a fascinating discussion of his search for a centuries-old Kaifeng Jewish community, in a piece for the Tam Institute’s website.
In parallel to his history coursework, Tan is working towards a Jewish Studies Graduate Certificate. He is also a Brickman-Levin Fellow of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, Young NUS Fellow of the National University of Singapore, and a Yenching Scholar of the Yenching Academy of Peking University. Tonio Andrade, Professor of History, serves as Tan’s advisor.
Read an excerpt from the Tam Institute piece below along with the full reflection.
“With the help from the Tam Institute’s research grants, I have had the chance to visit and conduct research on a number of different Jewish communities in East and Southeast Asia. The community that I will be focusing on in this article is one that is relatively more well-known but has largely faded into obscurity in recent years: the Kaifeng Jews. Although I have seen mentions of this community in passing when I read scholarship about Jewish history or when I visited different Jewish museums, detailed information about this community, especially regarding its recent history, is quite scanty. This puzzled me as the Kaifeng Jewish community is one of the oldest Jewish communities in Asia, dating back at least to the Song dynasty that existed around 1000 years ago when Kaifeng was the imperial capital, so I knew I had to go see it for myself.“
