In 1909, Emilia Snethlage, a German ornithologist working for the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, arrived at the Curuá River in the eastern Brazilian Amazon. Just five years earlier, Snethlage (1868-1929) had received a Ph.D. from Freiburg University at a time when women…
Images of bulldozers felling large trees appear on the screen. With a heroic soundtrack in the background and narration in an epic tone, the voice over declares, “the revolution comes to the jungle.” The color footage is from a 1971 Brazilian newsreel about the construction of…
English + Español
Sometimes we find our research topics in other people’s footnotes. I first read Canaima (1935), a lesser-studied novel by author, teacher and former president Rómulo Gallegos (1884-1969), as a student of Latin American literature in the doctoral program at Johns Hopkins…
English + Español
The 19th century continues to live within us in many ways. One of those ways is the presence of national typologies in our imagination. Cowboys, gauchos, harvesters and horsemen make up a portfolio of picturesque images that have found their way into movies, posters…
English + Español + Português
In June of 2017, when I should have been writing my dissertation in Andean archaeology, I joined an archaeological project led by Helena Lima, researcher and curator at the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi in Belém, Pará. I am an archaeologist who, until recently…
