Dr Daniel McDonald

I am a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean whose research centers on modern Brazil. My current work explores the intersection of inequality and citizenship across the twentieth century with thematic focuses on the Catholic Church, cities, migration, and human rights. I also publish on the digital and public humanities and conduct projects involving participatory community-based archiving and digitization, GIS, and multi-media applications.

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. At Oxford, I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in the history of Catholicism in Latin America. As part of the role, I am an affiliate of the Latin American Centre and the project The Global Pontificate of Pius XII: Catholicism in a Divided World.

Research Interests

• Inequality, Citizenship, and Human Rights
• Global History of Catholicism
• Urban History
• Migration

I am especially interested in how non-elite actors constructed novel understandings of rights and democracy in twentieth-century Latin America. More recently, this research has taken on a global scope as my work explores how Latin American Catholics shaped emerging ideas about human rights and social justice during the mid-twentieth century.

My current book manuscript, Peripheral Citizenship: Urban Grassroots Movements and the Making of Modern Brazil, is under contract with the University of California Press. Peripheral Citizenship explores 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 an innovative collaborative digitization project and over fifty oral histories, Peripheral Citizenship goes within these movements to trace how they articulated and modeled alternative understandings of rights and democracy across Brazil’s civil-military dictatorship (1964-1985) and the subsequent transition to democracy.

My work in the digital and public humanities centers on collaborative archiving and digitization. I directed the Grassroots Archive Digital Initiative, an effort to organize and digitize historical documents held by grassroots movements in the urban periphery for the Centro de Memória Urbana at the Universidade Federal de São Paulo – Campus Zona Leste. I am also a co-investigator for Favelas.br, an emerging national network of favela associations and allied academics working on community-based archiving and digitization projects. Alongside these projects, I am developing a public-facing historical GIS project, Mapping the Megacity, that explores urbanization and social mobilization in São Paulo.
 

You can follow me on my personal website and on Twitter @DanMcDonaldDM