Paulo Fontes
Paulo Fontes is a professor at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and a researcher of the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). A historian of Brazilian labor and working-class culture after World War II, Fontes is the author of several articles, book chapters, and books on these topics.
At Radcliffe, Fontes is completing a book about class and racial relations in Brazil between the 1940s and 1970s, a period of industrial growth and urbanization. It was also a moment of a hegemonic discourse that portrayed Brazil as a “racial democracy.” By tracing the trajectory of black trade unionists, he argues that “racial democracy” and labor policies that began in the 1930s were two sides of the same coin. His project aims to be an innovative contribution to the complex history of inequalities, particularly through the struggles for racial and social justice and democracy in Brazil and elsewhere.
Fontes received his PhD in social history from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas in 2003. He was a professor at the Fundação Getulio Vargas (2008–2017), a visiting professor at Duke (2004) and Princeton (2006–2007) Universities, and a visiting fellow at the International Institute of Social History, in Amsterdam (2013), and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2014). His book Migration and the Making of Industrial São Paulo (Duke University Press, 2016) was the winner of the first Thomas E. Skidmore Prize, sponsored by the Brazilian National Archive and the Brazilian Studies Association.
