José Juan Pérez Meléndez

Jose Perez Melendez Portrait

Position Title
Assistant Professor

SSH 3226
Office Hours
Fall Quarter 2023: T 1:30-2:30pm / Th 9:00-10:00am
Bio

Education

  • Ph.D., History, University of Chicago, 2016
  • M.A., History, University of Chicago, 2011
  • M.S., Education, Mercy College, 2008
  • B.A., History, Princeton University, 2005

About

Professor José Juan Pérez Meléndez is a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean who specializes on nineteenth-century Brazil in broad Atlantic and world history contexts. His research centers on political, business and migratory dynamics that have shaped governmental mechanisms of population control and transport in the Americas. Before arriving at Davis, Professor Pérez Meléndez completed a postdoctoral stay as a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. His forthcoming book, titled Peopling for Profit in Imperial Brazil: Directed Migrations and the Business of Nineteenth-Century Colonization, charts the formation of early migration policy in Brazil in counterpoint to global processes and will be published by Cambridge University Press in early 2024.

Prof. Pérez Meléndez also focuses on the Caribbean as a secondary field of research. His current work on the region is twofold. On the one hand, he is examining nineteenth-century slavery in the context of the illegal slave trade between Puerto Rico and the Lesser Antilles. On the other hand, using a more public history approach, he is studying formal debates on Puerto Rican decolonization from the 1950s onward.

In addition, Prof. Pérez Meléndez is researching a new book project on the comparative political and social development of various Latin American polities that opted for conservative pathways in the post-independent period.

Research Focus

The long nineteenth century, world history, Latin America and the Caribbean, Brazil, the Atlantic in the Age of Revolutions, migrations, slavery and the illegal slave trade, business history and companies, nineteenth-century colonization, comparative/connected histories, intellectual history, Puerto Rico, US imperialism, twentieth- twenty-first-century decolonization movements

Publications

Teaching

Undergraduate Courses

  • The History of Latin America (1750-1898)
  • The History of Modern Brazil (1808 to the Present)
  • Latin American Migration History
  • Latin American Environmental History
  • Islands & Empire: US Colonial Archipelagos from the Philippines to Puerto Rico
  • Frantz Fanon: The Work, Times, and Afterlives of an Anti-Colonialist Paragon

Graduate Seminars

  • Historiography of Brazil
  • The Dark Decades: Making Sense of Latin American Post-Independences
  • Settler Colonialism? Empire & Nation-Building in Latin America & Beyond
  • The Company: Business Organization, Managerial Practices, and Corporate Actors in Global History
  • US Colonialism in Puerto Rico: Social, Legal, and Environmental Histories from Occupation to the Calls for Reparations

Awards

  • UC Davis Society of Hellman Fellowship (2022-2023)
  • Bridging the Divide Fellowship, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College (2022-2023)
  • Davis Humanities Institute Faculty Research Fellowship (2020-2021)
  • Wakeham Mentoring Fellowship (2019)
  • Sherman Emerging Scholar Lectureship, University of North Carolina, Wilmington (2019)
  • Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellowship, European University Institute (2016-2017)
  • American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellowship (2015-2016)
  • Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship (2013-2014)

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