Tinker Visiting Professors

The Tinker description

Marcos Cueto is a foremost historian of science, medicine, and public health in Latin America. His early research focused on the Rockefeller Foundation’s technological projects in the region. For more than two decades, Cueto’s path-breaking research on epidemics in Latin America has focusing on how state and society in Mexico and Peru interact to shape the success of public responses. This research informs his recent analysis of the covid pandemic and its heavy toll in Latin America, especially in Brazil. Throughout his career, Cueto has shown a strong interest in how indigenous knowledge and cultures have impacted medicine and health sciences, especially with respect to epidemics. In recent years, he has followed a global and comparative approach, researching the history of the World Health Organization and of scientific collaboration in the Global South. Cueto is currently a Professor of the History of Health at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FIOCRUZ), in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and has been a Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University.

He will be teaching Covid-19 and Other Epidemics in Latin American History.

Joana Monteiro’s unique career as a scholar and public servant makes her one of the leading voices in debates on organized crime, policing, and the rule of law in Brazil. Academically, she is a prominent quantitative scholar who has identified critical causal impacts of urban violence and policy initiatives. Monteiro has brought her passion for rigorous research into the public sector. As Director of the State of Rio de Janeiro’s Institute of Public Security, responsible for collection and dissemination of official statistics on crime, violence, and policing, Monteiro produced innovative analyses and data interfaces for public use of ISP data. The Research Unit within the State Attorney General Office that she founded has produced a series of innovative mappings and analyses of Rio’s organized criminal groups and their territorial control and clashes over favelas. Monteiro has held research fellowships at Harvard and Columbia Universities, and recently founded the Center for Applied Research in Public Security at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation in Brazil, where she is a Professor of Public Policy. 

She will be teaching Organized Criminal Groups in Latin America.

Esmeralda Negrão is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sao Paulo. She has conducted extensive work revisiting the origins of some features of Brazilian Portuguese. In particular, she has argued for some grammatical contributions from African languages, especially Kimbundu (spoken in Angola), whose speakers constituted a significant proportion of the enslaved African population. Her research is particularly important because Brazil has produced no creole, although it engaged in sugarcane cultivation about a century before the Caribbean colonies (including Suriname, Guyana, and Guyane) invested in this economic venture, whose enslaved labor produced various creoles.

She will be teaching Brazilian Portuguese Syntax: Identifying African Substrate Influence

She will be teaching The Economic History of Latin America.

He will be teaching Democratic Erosion.

He will be teaching Writing the Unspeakable: History, Memory, and Reflection through Literature.

She will be teaching Introduction to Demographic Methods: An Application to Latin America.