teixeira@fas.harvard.edu

Melissa Teixeira is a historian of modern Brazil and the Lusophone world, with a particular interest in legal history and the history of economic life. Her current book project is based on her dissertation South Atlantic Corporatism: Development, Law, and Citizenship in Brazil and Portugal, 1919-1945. It is a comparative, transnational and global history of how social scientists, intellectuals, jurists, and politicians in Brazil and Portugal responded to economic and political crises in the wake of the Great Depression. The project centers on the common turn to corporatism in these years, which served as a blueprint for how to transform the state into an agent of national – or imperial – development. The manuscript situates these two national experiments within the South Atlantic intellectual networks that mobilized new ideas of citizenship and development as well as in a global conjuncture that drew this region into dialogue with the US New Deal, Keynesianism, and social constitutionalism.

Melissa’s research interests include the history of Brazil and Latin America, as well as Portugal and the Lusophone world; economic history and the history of economic ideas; constitutionalism and legal history; the history of the social sciences; global history; and the methodological questions that arise with the writing of comparative and transnational history.

Before coming to Harvard, Melissa received her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University (2016). She also holds an M.Phil. in Economic and Social History from the University of Cambridge (2010) and graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in History and Economics from the University of Pennsylvania (2008).