Faculty

1. Luis Araujo is an Assistant Professor of Economics. He teaches undergraduate macroeconomics and graduate monetary theory, and his research interests include monetary theory and applied game theory.
2. Peter M. Beattieis an Associate Professor of History who teaches undergraduate survey courses and graduate seminars on Latin America and Brazil. In addition to his work as coeditor of the Luso Brazilian Review (Wisconsin U. Press), he published The Tribute of Blood: Army, Honor, Race, and Nation in Brazil 1864-1945, a Portuguese translation of which is forthcoming with Edusp, the academic press of the Universidade de São Paulo in 2009. He is the editor of The Human Tradition in Modern Brazil and Re-Capricorning the Atlantic: Luso-Brazilian and Luso-African Perspectives on Atlantic History, a special thematic volume of the Luso-Brazilian Review. His current research is on the decline of slavery, and its influence on penal justice in Imperial Brazil (1822-1889). His most recent publication is forthcoming in the journal The Americas in July, 2009: "Born Under the Cruel Rigor of Captivity, the Supplicant Left It Unexpectedly by Committing a Crime": Categorizing and Punishing Slave Convicts in Brazil, 1830-1897.
3. Laura Rudolph Cloud, an Associate Professor of Studio Art, is organizing a new study abroad program in Florianopolis with a focus on the arts in partnership with the Universidade Estadual de Santa Catarina.
4. Saulo Gouveia is an Assistant Professor of Portuguese language and Brazilian literature. He teaches Portuguese language courses as well as introductory courses on Brazilian cinema, music, culture, and literature. His research focuses on modern and contemporary Brazilian literature, cultural and intellectual history, and state-sponsored cultural/educational policies. Gouveia will lead a study abroad program in Florianopolis with a focus on Portuguese language instruction and Brazilian culture in partnership with the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina.
5. Hamish Gow is an Associate Professor of International Agribusiness Management and is the Director of Partnerships for Food Industry Development - Fruits & Vegetables and the Global Agrifood Systems Development Initiative. He has extensive industry experience working and conducting research on international agribusiness and supply chain management issues related to the procurement and export of Brazilian and Central American food and agricultural products.
6. Stephen Hamilton is a Professor of Zoology who works on the ecology of tropical rivers and floodplains and has extensive experience with research on Brazil's swampy Pantanal region, as well as on the Orinoco River in Venezuela and the Amazon River system in Brazil, Peru and Ecuador. His research spans hydrology, ecology, and biogeochemistry.
7. Walter Hawthorne is an Associate Professor of History whose current research focuses on the slave trade from Guine-Bissau to northern Brazil in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is the author of Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast,1400-1900, and he teaches courses on African history and the South Atlantic connections between Africa and Brazil. He plans to develop a course on the Lusophone colonial world that will serve as a precursor to our Modern Brazilian history course.
8. Dr. Camie Heleski is a Specialist who works with the Animal Science Department's Horse Management Program & Animal Behavior and Welfare Group. She has done field work with horse care in southern Brazil and wants to continue this extension work and further her research in support of the Brazil initiative.
9. James Kielbaso is a Professor of Forestry whose research interests and publications include urban forestry in Brazil.
10. Gerd Kortemeyer is an Assistant Professor in Lyman Briggs College with adjunct appointments in Physics-Astronomy and Science and Math Education. He directs the LON-CAPA project (http://www.lon-capa.org/) in which more than 130 institutions participate. Though most of these institutions are in the U.S., institutions from Germany, Japan, Korea, China, South Africa, and Brazil also participate (http://www.lon-capa.org/institutions.html). LON-CAPA is a tool that enables faculty to author and share resources for online teaching and learning, mostly in the natural sciences, engineering, and mathematics (http://www.lon-capa.org/sharedpool.html).
11. Ingeborg Langohr is an Assistant Professor in Veterinary Anatomic Pathology at Michigan State University (MSU), with a dual appointment in the Diagnostic Center for Population and Animal Health and the College of Veterinary Medicine. She received a Doctor in Veterinary Medicine and a Masters degree from the School of Veterinary Medicine at the Federal University of Santa Maria, RS, Brazil and a PhD in Anatomic and Comparative Pathology from Purdue University. She is involved in various academic and research activities conducted at Brazilian veterinary schools, functioning primarily as a consultant, collaborator, and ad-hoc reviewer for a Brazilian periodical.
12. Robert Nason is Chairperson and Professor of the Department of Marketing and Supply Chain Management. He teaches marketing seminars for undergraduates and graduate students. Recent publications address the issues of marketing within a public policy context and as a potential tool for development. Previous research focused on Latin America as part of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Latin American Food Marketing Study, for which he was the principal investigator. This assignment required residence in Brazil and involved the study of economic development and marketing systems. He is very active on the national scene as an editor, reviewer and conference chair.
13. Carlos Pereira is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science. His main research interests and publications focus on political institutions in Brazil and the application of game theory and quantitative methods to comparative political institutions, political behavior, and public policies.
14. Steven Pueppke is an MSU Vice President for Research and Director of the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station. He also heads the interdisciplinary Office of Biobased Technologies (bioeconomy.msu.edu). Vice President Pueppke is working with CLACS to establish a research intensive relationship with the Escola Superior de Agricultura Luiz de Queiroz of the University of São Paulo system that focuses on biofuels.
15. Frederick Rauscher is a specialist in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. He has ties to Brazilian Kant scholars at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Parana, and other universities. He has hosted Brazilian scholars at MSU, and has presented papers half a dozen times in Brazil. He has recently edited a translation of a number of articles from Portuguese into English to better divulge contemporary Brazilian research on Kant. His future work will also extend to Brazilian political philosophy in the Enlightenment tradition.
16. Thomas Reardon is a Professor of Agriculture Economics whose research focuses on supermarkets and produce quality and safety standards. He has published extensively on these issues and worked as a consultant for international organizations around the world, including in Latin America and Brazil.
17. Marília Scaff Rocha Ribeiro is an Assistant Professor of Portuguese language and Brazilian literature. Her research focuses on contemporary Brazilian novels.
18. Cristina Schmitt, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, has published and taught extensively on the Portuguese language. In spring 2004 she was invited to be an instructor at Universidade de Campinas in Evelin: Escola de Verão de Linguistica Formal da América do Sul (Summer School in Formal Linguistics of South America) funded by the Linguistics Department at MIT.
19. Cynthia Simmons, Associate Professor of Geography and Coordinator of the Brazil Initiative, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She is a human geographer who studies the interaction between economic development and environmental policy, with special attention given to unintended social and environmental consequences. Her recent research examines the social and environmental impacts of agrarian reform, land conflict, and mega-project development in the Brazilian Amazon.
20. David Skole is a Professor of Forestry. The focus of his research is on problems of land use and cover change as it effects the environment, particularly loss of forests and other natural resources, and emerging issues related to urban growth. He has worked closely with NASA and US Agency for International Development as an advisor and investigator, and the United Nations. He has been an advisor to both international public and the private sector concerns, including large environmental projects such as the Brazil SIVAM project which is developing improved regional monitoring and management capabilities for the Amazon region under contract to several U.S. companies. His research team works closely with state and local communities in the Midwest and Michigan, as well as with more than 50 scientists and government natural resources managers in a dozen countries, including Brazil. Skole is the principal investigator and director of the Tropical Rain Forest Information Center, which is the largest distributor of geospatial information on the state of tropical forests outside the federal government, and one of the leading contributors to the FAO Forest Resource Assessment program.
21. Ana Paula Tostes is Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at MSU and she has worked as an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of São Paulo. She holds a Ph.D. in politics from the Research Institute of Rio de Janeiro (IUPERJ). She has been researching and teaching in the following areas: political theory and history of the modern states, and the relationship between International Law and International Relations. Her books União Européia: o poder politico do direito and Justice and transnational democracy bring a Brazilian perspective to international relations.
22. Remke van Dam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences. He uses high-resolution geophysical methods for non-invasive characterization of the subsurface and processes therein. Applications include the study of groundwater and contaminant flow in heterogeneous aquifers and imaging of root-zone moisture dynamics to improve understanding of the impacts of changing climate and land use on the hydrologic cycle.
23. Robert Walker, Professor of Geography, is also an Adjunct Professor at the Federal University of Bahia and the University of São Paulo in Brazil. He has published extensively on issues of land use dynamics, deforestation, population and the environment, behavioral modeling, and GIS/Remote Sensing Applications. He has received grants from the National Science Foundation and NASA for his research in the Amazon.
24. Michael Weber is a Professor of Agricultural Economics. Some of his research and publications address the issue of improving rural product markets and food distribution systems, and overall food security in developing countries, especially in Latin America.
25. Erica Windler is an Assistant Professor of History whose research focuses on the history of childhood in nineteenth century Rio de Janeiro, the urban center with the largest slave population in the Atlantic world. Her book manuscript in progress is "Shaping Honest Women, Molding Useful Men: Boys, Girls, Family, and State in Imperial Rio de Janeiro." She teaches course on the history of Brazil, Latin America, and family.
26. Antoinette WinklerPrins, Associate Professor of Geography, teaches the undergraduate survey course on the geography of Latin America as well as other general education and graduate level courses where she commonly uses case studies from Brazil and Amazonia to illustrate concepts. Her research has focused on environmental knowledge systems and smallholder agriculture on the floodplain of the Amazon River in the region around Santarém, Pará. She has also investigated the social networks that support urban agriculture in homegardens in Santarém, and more recently is pursuing research on Amazonian Dark Earths in collaboration with agronomists from INPA (the National Institute for Amazonian Research) in Manaus.
27. Jonas Zoninsein, Professor of James Madison Residential College at MSU, teaches the undergraduate economic analysis of Latin America course as well as seminars on Latin America societies. He has published extensively on issues related to Brazil including, "The Economic Case for Combating Racial and Ethnic Exclusion in Latin American Countries." He has also published many technical reports and presented widely at conferences. His most recent research work addresses the roles of civil society and the nation-state in promoting a bottom-up process of globalization.