Bryan Pitts

Assistant Director, Latin American Institute
Box 951447
Bunche Hall 10347
UCLA
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1447
bpitts@international.ucla.edu
Keywords: Latin America, Politics, Gender, Brazil, History

Bryan Pitts is a historian of 20th century Brazil. He received an M.A. from Vanderbilt University (2006) and a Ph.D. in Latin American History from Duke University (2013) and has been at UCLA since 2020. His newly-published book, Until the Storm Passes: Politicians, Democracy, and the Demise of Brazil’s Military Dictatorship (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2023), explains the fall of Brazil’s 1964-85 military regime in light of the changes it wrought on the dispositions and actions of civilian political elites and their attitudes toward democracy and mass mobilization. He has also published articles or book chapters on representations of race in Brazilian gay media, the sexual and romantic experiences of gay Brazilian men who travel abroad as tourists, the relationship between the United States and Brazil under the presidencies of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, and the use of audio recordings as historical sources. He has written on contemporary Brazilian politics for media outlets such as O Estado de S. Paulo, El País, Jacobin, NACLA, and Brasil Wire.