Dr Daniel McDonald

I am a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean whose research centers on modern Brazil. My current work explores issues of citizenship and inequality with thematic focuses on cities, the Catholic Church, and migration. I also publish on the digital and public humanities and conduct projects involving participatory community-based digitization and spatial analysis.

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. 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

• Citizenship and Inequality
• Global History of Catholicism
• Urban History
• Migration
• The Cold War

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 development, social justice, and human rights during the mid-twentieth century.

My current book manuscript, Peripheral Citizenship: Popular Movements and the Catholic Church in Urban 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.

I am currently involved in two collaborative publications. The first is as co-editor of a thematic edition of Latin American Perspectives, “Revisiting the Democratic Transition in Brazil.” See the CFP here. And the second is as co-editor of an edited volume on Catholicism and the Cold War in Latin America.

My work in the digital and public humanities centers on collaborative archiving and digitization as well as spatial analysis. I oversaw the Grassroots Archive Digital Initiative, an effort to organize and digitize historical documents held by social movements in São Paulo for the Centro de Memória Urbana at the Universidade Federal de São Paulo – Campus Zona Leste. An article on this experience is forthcoming in the American Historical Review. I am also a co-investigator for Favelas.br, an emerging network of favela associations and allied academics that supports community-based archiving and digitization projects and the development of co-production methodologies.

Also forthcoming in the American Historical Review is a video essay that draws on Urban Intermedia to examine visual lexicons of resilience in hand-drawn illustrations found social on movement paraphernalia in São Paulo. A sperate written article examines and contextualizes the video essay. 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