Re-Thinking Ethnic Studies: View from Latin America

Location

Shiley Center for Science and Technology, Room 133

Free

We are pleased to bring to campus noted scholar Jeffery Lesser, the Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of Latin American history and chair, Department of History at Emory University, who will speak to us about ethnic studies viewed through a Latin American lens.

The focus of his research is ethnicity, immigration and race, especially in Brazil. He is the award-winning author of A Discontented Diaspora: Japanese-Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy (Duke University Press, 2007), Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil (Duke University Press, 1999): Best Book Prize, Latin American Studies Association-Brazil in Comparative Perspective Section, and Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Question (University of California Press, 1994): Best Book Prize, New England Council on Latin American Studies. Lesser edited Searching for Home Abroad: Japanese-Brazilians and Transnationalism (Duke University Press, 2003) and co-edited Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans (University of New Mexico Press, 2008), and Arab and Jewish Immigrants in Latin America: Images and Realities (Frank Cass, 1998).

His interests surround the construction of national identity in Brazil. His past work has focused on how minority groups understand their own and national space. He has studied a range of groups including Arab-Brazilians and Jewish-Brazilians. Lesser is currently finishing a history of immigration and ethnicity in Brazil and his next project analyzes how soccer is used to mobilize counter-cultural activity off the playing field in Brazil.