Dr Daniel McDonald

I am a historian of Latin America in global perspective whose research and teaching centers on inequality, religion, urban history, and the Cold War. At Oxford, I am a Fulford JRF at Somerville College with a joint appointment in the Faculty of History and the OSGA Latin American Centre and previously was associated with St Antony's College. Concurrently, I am a postdoctoral research fellow for the "Global Pontificate of Pius XII: Catholicism in a Divided World" research network based at the German Historical Institute in Rome directed by Dr Simon Unger and overseen at Oxford by Professor Paul Betts. Before coming to Oxford, I held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University and the University of Rochester. I received my PhD in Latin American and Caribbean History from Brown University.

Research Interests

• Inequality & citizenship
• Global history of Catholicism
• Urban history
• The Cold War
• Migration

My current book manuscript, Peripheral Citizenship: Popular Movements and the Progressive Catholic Church in Urban Brazil examines how non-elite actors constructed novel understandings of rights and democracy in twentieth-century Latin America, especially through religion, and is forthcoming with the University of California Press in summer 2026. The book does so by exploring how Catholic grassroots movements in São Paulo’s urban periphery negotiated the simultaneous rise of the megacity and the transition from authoritarian to democratic rule. Drawing on a collaborative digitization project and over fifty oral histories, Peripheral Citizenship situates these movements within transnational Catholic processes and networks as they articulated alternative visions of rights and democracy grounded in everyday life and liberation theology. In doing so, Peripheral Citizenship breaks with traditional "top-down" accounts of citizenship to show that the urban periphery became a key theater for constructing citizenship from the peripheries of not just the city but the Brazilian nation and the global Church. I have published related articles in the American Historical Review, the Hispanic American Historical Review, and The Americas.

Increasingly, my work has taken on an even wider geographic scope.  At Oxford, I have developed two lines of research. One explores the global deployment of people, funds, and institutions by the Catholic Church from Europe, North America, and Australia to Latin America in the Cold War. The other examines the rise of Catholic internationalism "from the south" through a transnational history of Latin American Catholic Action. Key to this work has been research in the Vatican archives from the papacy of Pius XII (1939-1958) alongside a global program of archival work supported by the "Global Pontificate of Pius XII" network at GHI Rome as well as a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Small Research Grant and an OUP Fell Fund Research Grant.

I am currently involved co-editing two collaborative publications. The first is with Felipe Loureiro (São Paulo) of a thematic edition of Latin American Perspectives, “Revisiting the Democratic Transition in Brazil.” See the CFP here. The second is as co-editor of an edited volume on Catholicism and the Cold War in Latin America with Simon Unger (GHI Rome/Princeton) and Jaime Pensado (Notre Dame) developed with the support of the "Global Pontificate of Pius XII" network.

Alongside my scholarly work, I have developed a broad portfolio of collaborative, digital, and public projects, especially in participatory archiving, digitization, and spatial analysis. Most recently, I was a researcher for the Netflix documentary Apocalypse in the Tropics (2025) by Oscar-nominated director Petra Costa on evangelical influence on far-right politics in contemporary Brazil. I am currently a member of the coordinating committee for the Favelas.br Institute (Instituto Favelas.br), a network of favela associations and allied academics that supports community-based archiving and digitization projects and the development of co-production methodologies, based at the Federal University of São Paulo - Guarulhos. Together with the Museu da Maré archival director Thamires Ribeiro and Favelas.br director Rodrigo Bonciani, I am developing a special dossier on historical knowledge production in Brazilian favelas. I have written about my past collaborative digitization projects in the American Historical Review.

You can read more about my research and teaching on my personal website.