Spotlight on Brazil: Faculty Flash Talks & Community Networking

Date & Time: Thursday, September 7, 2023,  5:00pm to 7:30pm

Location: Tsai Auditorium, GSD Back Yard

This event will be held in Portuguese.

Speakers: Alejandro de la Fuente, Director of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute, Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics, Professor of African and African American Studies and of History; Cristiane Soares, Senior Preceptor in Portuguese; Fernanda Viegas, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science; Yanilda González, Assistant Professor of Public Policy
Moderated by: Marcia Castro, Andelot Professor of Demography; Chair of the Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Chair, Brazil Studies Program - DRCLAS

Join us for a two-part event – half flash talks, half social gathering – to celebrate the beginning of the academic year. To begin, a few Harvard faculty will deliver short presentations on their research and ongoing initiatives related to Brazil. Following the roundtable, we will initiate our traditional “Welcome (Back)” networking session for new and returning Brazilian (and Brazilianist) students, faculty, and visiting scholars. This is an unstructured and informal networking session designed to help foster new connections and strengthen existing ties within the Harvard-Brazil community.

The Faculty Panel will take place in S010, Tsai Auditorium, at CGIS South (1730 Cambridge St.) from approximately 5-6:20pm. The networking session will occur outdoors in the GSD Back Yard, across the street from CGIS South.

Alejandro de la Fuente is a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean who specializes in the study of comparative slavery and race relations. Professor de la Fuente’s works on race, slavery, law, art, and Atlantic history have been published in Spanish, English, Portuguese, Italian, German, and French. He is the author of Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge University Press, 2020, coauthored with Ariela J. Gross), Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), and of A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), published in Spanish as Una nación para todos: raza, desigualdad y política en Cuba, 1900-2000 (Madrid: Editorial Colibrí, 2001), winner of the Southern Historical Association's 2003 prize for “best book in Latin American history.” He is the coeditor, with George Reid Andrews, of Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2018, available in Spanish and Portuguese) and of the “Afro-Latin America” book series, Cambridge University Press. Professor de la Fuente is also the curator of three art exhibits dealing with issues of race and the author or editor of their corresponding volumes: Queloides: Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art (Havana-Pittsburgh-New York City-Cambridge, Ma, 2010-12); Drapetomania: Grupo Antillano and the Art of Afro-Cuba (Santiago de Cuba-Havana-New York City-Cambridge, Ma-San Francisco-Philadelphia-Chicago, 2013-16) and Diago: The Pasts of this Afro-Cuban Present (Cambridge, Ma-Miami, ongoing). Professor de la Fuente is the founding Director of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research and the faculty Chair of the Cuba Studies Program, DRCLAS. He is also the Senior Editor of the journal Cuban Studies.

Dr. Cristiane Soares has a BA in Portuguese and Brazilian Literature, a MA in Applied Linguistics, and a PhD in Luso-Afro-Brazilian Studies and Theory. Cristiane has fifteen year of experience teaching Portuguese as a foreign and heritage language in the United States. Before coming to Harvard, Cristiane spent twelve years coordinating the Portuguese Program at Tufts University, where she created a Minor in Portuguese. Cristiane has taught language courses at all levels and culture courses like Brazilian music, Brazilian cinema, Brazilian folklore, Introduction to Brazilian Culture and History, and Portuguese in the Community. Cristiane is currently Senior Preceptor and Coordinator of the Portuguese language program. Her current research focuses on Portuguese pedagogy, Portuguese as a foreign and heritage language, and inclusive and non-binary language in Portuguese.

Fernanda Viegas is the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard with an affiliation at the Harvard Business School. She co-leads the Insight and Interaction Lab with Professor Martin Wattenberg, and is also the Sally Starling Seaver Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Viegas is also a Principal Scientist at Google, where she co-founded the PAIR (People + AI Research) initiative and the Big Picture team. Her work in machine learning focuses on improving human/AI interaction with a broader agenda of democratizing AI technology. Viegas is also interested in weaving societal expectations and values into the design and evaluation of AI systems. Viegas' focus on data visualization is known for its contributions to social and collaborative visualization. The systems her team have created are used daily by millions of people. Viegas´ passion for making complex data understandable to lay viewers has led me to visualize wind currents, study collaboration patterns in Wikipedia, and create dynamic maps of news around the world. Her visualization-based artwork with Martin has been exhibited worldwide, and is part of the permanent collection of Museum of Modern Art in New York. Viegas holds a PhD from the MIT Media Lab. She's originally from Brazil and misses the jungle and the year-round warm weather in Rio de Janeiro where she grew up.

Yanilda María González is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research focuses on policing, state violence, and citizenship in democracy, examining how race, class, and other forms of inequality shape these processes. González’s book Authoritarian Police in Democracy: Contested Security in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2020), studies the persistence of police forces as authoritarian enclaves in otherwise democratic states, demonstrating how ordinary democratic politics in unequal societies can both reproduce authoritarian policing and bring about rare moments of expansive reforms. Authoritarian Police in Democracy received the Gregory Luebbert Prize for Best Book in Comparative Politics from the American Political Science Association (2022), as well as the Donna Lee Van Cott Award for Best Book on Latin American Politics and Institutions from the Latin American Studies Association (2022). González received the Clarence Stone Scholar Award from the Urban and Local Politics Section of the American Political Science Association (2022). González received her PhD in Politics and Social Policy from Princeton University. Prior to joining HKS she was an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. González previously worked at a number of human rights organizations in the US and Argentina, including the New York Civil Liberties Union, ANDHES, and Equipo Latinoaméricano de Justicia y Género.

Marcia Castro is Andelot Professor of Demography, Chair of the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, and Chair of the Brazil Studies Program of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS). Her research focuses on the development and use of multidisciplinary approaches to identify the determinants of infectious disease transmission in different ecological settings to inform control policies. She has more than 15 years of collaboration with Brazilian researchers, Health Secretariats, and the Ministry of Health particularly related to infectious diseases. She made important contributions during recent public health emergencies (the Zika virus epidemic and the COVD-19 pandemic). Castro has projects on malaria, COVID-19, arboviruses, infant/child mortality and development, and climate change in the Brazilian Amazon. Specifically, on COVID-19 she has been assessing the spatiotemporal pattern of COVID-19 spread in Brazil, mortality, and fertility changes due to the pandemic, risk factors for mortality, and vaccine effectiveness. She serves on several advisory boards in Brazil, including the Institute for the Studies of Health Policies (IEPS), the Science Center for Early Childhood (NCPI), and Instituto Todos Pela Saúde (ITpS). She earned a PhD in Demography from Princeton University.