J.J. Perez

Position Title
Assistant Professor

  • History
Bio

Professor José Juan Pérez Meléndez is a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean who specializes on nineteenth-century Brazil in broad Atlantic and world history contexts. His research centers on political, business and migratory dynamics that have shaped governmental mechanisms of population control and transport in the Americas. Before arriving at Davis, Professor Pérez Meléndez completed a postdoctoral stay as a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. He is currently writing Peopling for Profit: Colonization and the Brazilian Empire, 1808-1889, a book that charts the formation of early migration policy in Brazil in counterpoint to global processes.

Research Focus

Latin America and the Caribbean, Brazil, the Atlantic in the Age of Revolutions, migrations, slavery, nineteenth-century business and companies, colonization (1800s-1900s), intellectual history.

Selected Publications
  • “Reconsidering Colonization Policy in Brazil: The Regency Years and the World Beyond,” Revista Brasileira de História (2014)
  • Peopling for Profit: Colonization and the Brazilian Empire, 1808-1889 (book manuscript in progress)

 

Undergraduate Courses

  • The History of Latin America (1750-1898)
  • The History of Modern Brazil (1808 to the Present)
  • Latin American Migration History
  • Latin American Environmental History
  • Islands & Empire: U.S. Colonial Archipelagos from the Philippines to Puerto Rico

Graduate Seminars

  • Historiography of Brazil
  • The Dark Decades: Making Sense of Latin American Post-Independences
  • Settler Colonialism? Empire & Nation-Building in Latin America & Beyond

 

Awards
  • Sherman Emerging Scholar Lectureship, University of North Carolina, Wilmington (2019)
  • Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellowship, European University Institute (2016-2017)
  • American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellowship (2015-2016)
  • Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship (2013-2014)