History Department

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 first book, titled Peopling for Profit in Imperial Brazil: Directed Migrations and the Business of Nineteenth-Century Colonization (2024), charts the formation of early migration policy in Brazil in counterpoint to global processes. He is currently working on two different book projects: one surveying the functional meanings of monarchism across post-independence Latin America, and the other detailing a company/environmental history of the leading navigation company in the Brazilian Empire.

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 among Puerto Rico, the Lesser Antilles and Cuba. On the other hand, he is engaged in the public history of formal debates on Puerto Rican decolonization from the 1950s onward.

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, decolonization movements

Publications

• Peopling for Profit in Imperial Brazil: Directed Migrations and the Business of Nineteenth-Century Colonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024).
• “A Tropical Vienna: The Influence of German Political Economy on Brazilian Independence” (forthcoming in The Americas)
• “The Meanings of Restriction: The Heydt Rescript and German Migrations to Nineteenth-Century Brazil,” História Econômica & História de Empresas 27, nº 3 (Sept.-Dec. 2024): 683-718.
• "De diásporas y asambleas soberanistas," Categoría Cinco 3, nº 2 (verano/otoño 2023).
• "Outbreaks, Shares, and Contracts: The Press and the Migrant Trade in Early Imperial Brazil," in Celso Castilho, Teresa Cribelli, and Hendrik Kraay, eds. Press, Power, and Culture in Imperial Brazil (Albuquerque: New Mexico University Press, 2021).
• “Reconsidering Colonization Policy in Brazil: The Regency Years and the World Beyond,” Revista Brasileira de História (2014).

Teaching

Undergraduate Courses

Awards