Jeffrey Lesser

Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Latin American History and Director,  Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, (B.A., Brown University, 1982; Ph.D., New York University, 1989); modern Latin American history, focusing on ethnicity, immigration and race, especially in Brazil. 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) awarded the 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) awarded the Best Book Prize, New England Council on Latin American Studies. Editor, Searching for Home Abroad: Japanese-Brazilians and Transnationalism (Duke University Press, 2003); Co-editor, Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans (University of New Mexico Press, 2008) and Arab and Jewish Immigrants in Latin America: Images and Realities (Frank Cass, 1998).

My interests surround the construction of national identity in Brazil.  My past work has focused on how minority groups understand their own and national space. I have studied a range of groups including Arab-Brazilians and Jewish-Brazilians.  My most recent book examines the participation of Japanese-Brazilians in student movements, the artistic sphere, and in the armed struggle against Brazil’s dictatorship that began in 1964.  I am now beginning research on soccer and its fans as a counter-culture movement in Brazil in the twentieth century and I am also writing a general history of immigration and ethnicity in Brazil

My research is important to my teaching, and many of my classes involve oral history projects on immigrant and minority groups that are presented via web-sites. See, for example,

http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~jlesser/ and
http://www.conncoll.edu/academics/departments/transnat/

Curriculum Vitae