Projects

Living and Dying in São Paulo: Immigrants, Health, and the Built Environment in Brazil(Duke University Press, 2025/ Viver e morrer em São Paulo: Imigração, saúde e infraestrutura urbana (século XIX até o presente)(São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2025).

There is a saying in Brazil: “Mosquitoes are democratic: they bite the rich and the poor alike.” Why then is bad health—from violence to respiratory disease, from malaria to dengue—dispersed unevenly across different social and national groups? Living and Dying in São Paulo focuses on the Bom Retiro neighborhood to explore such questions by examining the competing visions of well-being in Brazil among racialized immigrants and policymakers and health officials. The book analyzes the fraught relationship between Bom Retiro residents and the state and healthcare agencies that have overseen community sanitation efforts since the mid-nineteenth century, drawing out the interconnected systems of the built environment, public health laws and practices, and citizenship. I employ the concept of “residues” to outline how continuing historical material, legislative, and social legacies structure contemporary daily life and health outcomes in the neighborhood. In so doing, I create a dialogue between the past and the present, showing how the relationship between culture and disease is both layered and interconnected. 

Living and Dying In São Paulo examines the competing visions of wellbeing among immigrants and representatives of the Health State including policymakers and health care professionals. The book analyzes how these actors lived and worked within rigid social and material structures that misattributed the relationship between cause (culture) and effect (disease) and thus led to enduring health issues. My project uses health and care (broadly defined) as windows into the connected systems of the built environment, public health laws and practices, and citizenship. It demonstrates how federal, state, and municipal health and immigration legislation (from about 1850 to present) engendered continuity and created social and material residues by triangulating the history of Brazilian public health research, laws and policies, and globally dominant ideas about disease and other health issues.

Both the English-language and Portuguese-language editions of Living and Dying In São Paulo are available as open access eBooks via awards from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded Emory University Digital Publishing in the Humanities program.

“Pauliceia 2.0”:  Collaborative Mapping Project for the City of São Paulo, 1870-1940

“Pauliceia 2.0” brings four different institutions, across two continents, together in transforming the relationship between the past and present and between producers and consumers of digital history. Pauliceia 2.0’s computational platform allows scholars and the broader public to collaborate in creating, organizing, storing, integrating, processing, and publishing urban history data sets.  Using the city of São Paulo during its period of urban and industrial modernization (1870-1940) as a base, Pauliceia 2.0 provides access to a common database and allows interaction among researchers, who contribute spatially- and temporally-represented events.  The platform allows researchers to produce maps and visualizations while at the same time contributing to the data within the system. This open source project enriches understanding of the history of São Paulo and offers an innovative model of research for the humanities that fosters collaborative work and the free flow of knowledge. 

Published Books: Research on Health, Immigration, and Ethnicity in Brazil”

My most recent book is Living and Dying in São Paulo: Immigrants, Health, and the Built Environment in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2025/Viver e morrer em São Paulo: Imigração, saúde e infraestrutura urbana (século XIX até o presente) (São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2025).

I am also the author of the following books:

I am also the author of Immigration, Ethnicity and National Identity in Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 2013; Editora UNESP, 2015); A Discontented Diaspora: Japanese-Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy (Duke University Press, 2007; Editora Paz e Terra, 2008), awarded the 2010 Roberto Reis Prize (Honorable Mention), Brazilian Studies Association; Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil (Duke University Press, 1999; Editora UNESP, 2001), awarded the Best Book Prize, Latin American Studies Association-Brazil in Comparative Perspective Section; and Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Question (University of California Press, 1994; Imago Editora, 2005; Tel Aviv University Publishing Projects, 1997), awarded the Best Book Prize, New England Council on Latin American Studies.