The Sleeping Giant Awakens: Unraveling Brazil's Surprising Success
January 29, 2009 - 4:00 pm
Peter Kingstone, University of Connecticut
Mauricio Font, The Bildner Center and The Graduate Center
Moderator:
Ken Erickson, The Graduate Center and Hunter College, CUNY
This is the first event in the new seminar series, “Brazil: 25 Years of Democracy,” which will be held throughout the academic year 2010-2011. In this initial panel, Professor Peter Kingstone will discuss the sources of Brazil’s successes relative to the low expectations at the start of the New Republic. Peter Kingstone will be joined by Bildner Center’s director Mauricio Font and a third panelist (TBA) to commemorate and reflect on 25 years of democracy and reform in Brazil.
About the Speakers:
Peter Kingstone is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Crafting Coalitions for Reform (with Penn State University Press), co-editor (with Timothy Power) of Democratic Brazil: Actors, Institutions, and Processes (University of Pittsburgh Press) and Democratic Brazil Revisited (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), as well as editor of Challenges to Democratization: Readings in Latin American Politics (Houghton Mifflin). He has published a number of articles on various aspects of the politics of economic reform in journals such as Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Political Research Quarterly, Latin American Politics and Society, and Latin American Research Review. He is currently working on projects related to neoliberal reform and its alternatives and pension reforms and privatization in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Venezuela.
Mauricio Font is Director of the Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies and Professor of Sociology at The Graduate Center and Queens College, City University of New York. His research examines problems of development and reform in Brazil, Cuba and Latin America as well as international cooperation in the Western Hemisphere. Prof. Font’s current research focuses in part on reform processes in Latin America, where institutional and social actors at all levels of government have been designing advanced approaches to address social needs, economic disparities, and world development.
