Brazil for Beginners

Marshall C. Eakin is Professor of History at Vanderbilt University.  A native Texan, he received his B.A. in history and anthropology from the University of Kansas in 1975, and his M.A. in Latin American history in 1977. He did his doctoral work in Latin American history at UCLA completing his Ph.D. in 1981.  Eakin taught at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles for two years before coming to Vanderbilt in 1983. He served as Executive Director of the Brazilian Studies Association from 2004-2011.

A historian of Latin America, Eakin specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Brazilian history.  His major publications have concentrated on economic and business history, industrialization, and the processes of nationalism and nation-building—primarily in the twentieth century.

He has co-edited four books and is the author of four more: British Enterprise in Brazil: The St. John d’el Rey Mining Company and the Morro Velho Gold Mine, 1830-1960 (Duke, 1989), Brazil: The Once and Future Country (St. Martin’s, 1997), Tropical Capitalism: The Industrialization of Belo Horizonte, Brazil (Palgrave, 2001), and The History of Latin America:  Collision of Cultures (Palgrave, 2007). Eakin has also created two video courses with the Teaching Company: Conquest of the Americas and The Americas in a Revolutionary Era. He has been awarded grants from Fulbright-Hays, the Tinker Foundation, the American Historical Association, the Corporation for National Service, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.