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About the UCLA Center for Brazilian Studies

The UCLA Latin American Institute is proud to announce the creation of the Center for Brazilian Studies. The Center represents an expansion of the previous Program on Brazil, which was established in 1989 to encourage cooperative research and academic initiatives related to Brazil. Over the years, the Program enhanced Brazilian Studies in Southern California and promoted greater understanding of and involvement with Brazil beyond the confines of academia-in the public sector, in the business and professional communities, and among the general public.

The new Center for Brazilian Studies will offer an on-going forum for faculty and students from different disciplines across campus with research interests in Brazil. The Center particularly invites collaborative initiatives that adopt a comparative perspective, engaging Brazil historically or in its regional, hemispheric and global contexts. The Center is committed to scholarly excellence and to fostering linkages between the Brazilian immigrant, business, and professional communities in Southern California. It sponsors Brazil-focused research by UCLA faculty and graduate students, especially multidisciplinary projects involving participants from various departments and schools on campus as well as from other institutions both in Brazil and the United States. The Center assists in the design, implementation, and administration of such projects. It currently maintains the Brazil Working Group, a lecture forum and an electronic mailing list aimed at gathering and circulating information on activities related to Brazil at UCLA and beyond.

Brazil in Global Networks: Continuity and Change

For the 2008-2010 academic years, the Center for Brazilian Studies will give special attention to the different kinds of historical and contemporary networks related to the establishment, growth, and present situation of Brazil in a world context. Brazilian society is the result of a series of socio-cultural dislocations and the inception of a wide web of relations between landscapes, ethnicities, national groups, and discourses. The specific networks linked to the production and organization of Brazil-in its natural, societal, historical, and artistic forms-are of special interest to the Center. "Brazil in Global Networks: Continuity and Change" will consist of a series of new courses, working group meetings, public lectures, a symposium on visual media, and a special library exhibit aimed at addressing the challenge of conceptualizing Brazil from a new, decentralized perspective. Students, visiting scholars, and faculty from UCLA and other institutions are invited to consider Brazil through the different ways its natural, social, and cultural networks persist in history and relate to other regions of the world.

The Center's agenda will include but also go beyond the extensive body of UCLA research on Brazil, including, for example, the associations between Brazilian and U.S. entrepreneurial elites, international affiliations in the Brazilian arts and intellectual life, transnational production and distribution of Brazilian visual media, relations between Brazilian political parties and global politics, biodiversity and Brazil-focused research on alternative medicine, migration chains to the United States, the role of international NGOs in major Brazilian cities, global vs. regional markets in the Southern Cone, race relations in North/South and transatlantic perspectives, and globalized strategies for enhancing library collections on Brazil.

"Brazil in Global Networks: Continuity and Change" welcomes students, scholars, and artists wishing to present original contributions to the debate. Some of the activities confirmed for the current year include the following:

• The on-going Brazilian Film Series, organized in collaboration with the Brazilian Consulate-General in Los Angeles (the first Wednesday of each month).
• Rio de Janeiro: Two Centuries of Urban Change, 1808-2008," an exhibit of Rio de Janeiro iconography held at the UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library's Department of Special Collections (January-June 2008).
• A symposium on film and television in Brazil, with a special focus on the Globo television network and Globo Filmes.

The Center is also committed to supporting comparative lectures, new courses, and special programs of interest to the business and professional communities of Los Angeles, held in cooperation with the Latin American Institute Associates. Additional course offerings, working group meetings, film showings, performances, and topical lectures will be announced through the Calendar of Events.