With Brazil growing more and more prominent on the international stage, the Duke Global Brazil Lab aims to offer students and faculty a chance to study the country in an interdisciplinary setting.
New to the University this Fall, the lab researches Brazil through a blend of the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. The lab is run through the Franklin Humanities Institute and is one of several recent programs indicating an increased interest in Brazil—including the Brazil and Portuguese Studies major, which is new this year, and the Duke Brazil Initiative, which launched last July.
"The lab is not a set of courses," said history professor John French, one of the co-directors of the Global Brazil Lab. "The lab is a set of collaborations that is supposed to lead to independent studies and projects between undergraduate and graduate students."
Duke's interest in Brazil has increased significantly over the past several years, said Katya Wesolowski, a lecturing fellow for the Thompson Writing Program who will teach in the lab. When she arrived at Duke in the mid-2000s, she was taken aback at how few opportunities there were to engage in Brazilian and Portuguese studies.
"I was surprised that Spanish speaking and African programs were very visible, but I couldn't find the Brazilians," she said. "I was shocked that there was not more visibility. This is a great way to bring all of us together."
The growing popularity and awareness of the country has attracted researchers with interests far beyond Brazilian history and Portuguese language. Each of the lab's three co-directors comes from a different discipline—French from history and African and African-American studies; Esther Gabara from romance studies and art, art history and visual studies; and Paul Baker from earth and ocean studies.
"I'm not a Brazilianist," Baker said. "But Brazil is an up-and-coming place and I knew that this would be a great opportunity for me and for the University in general."
Although Brazil has become more conspicuous in the media and in world politics within the last decade, the country has never been unimportant—just less accessible in popular culture, said Gabara, director of graduate studies for the romance studies department.
"I think that's what we're interested in showing —the ongoing importance of Brazil. We may be capitalizing a bit on the massive media attention bestowed upon them with these two entertainment and sports events," she said, referring to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics, both in Brazil.
Wesolowski said she has seen this trend mirrored in capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian fight dance that she practices and teaches a class on here at Duke.
"Capoeira has become this incredible global phenomenon," Wesolowski said. "When I started capoeira many years ago and I told people that this was what I did, I would get these blank stares. Now, capoeira is in pop culture, it's in commercials, it's referred to in popular dance magazines without any description of what it is.... It's really gone global."
Despite its growing popularity, there is still much to be learned about Brazil. The country's evolution over the past decade makes it particularly interesting to study, French said.
"Brazil is unquestionably the world's largest unknown country," he stated. "However, I'm amazed at how much Brazil has changed. I would say it is an entirely different place than it was three decades ago."
In addition to being interdisciplinary, the lab will be international—looking a Brazil not just as an individual country, but within the broader context of its place in the world, Gabara said.
"I think of Brazil comparatively. These big countries like Brazil and Argentina are typically studied by themselves, and I think we're missing a lot when we do that," Gabara noted. "We're not just interested in Brazil within its borders, but also the networks that connect Brazil."
The lab is funded through the Mellon Humanities Writ Large grant, which is leading a five-year initiative to examine the position of the humanities in undergraduate education.
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