Informativo - October and November 2008

October and November 2008
Harvard Business School's Centennial in 2008 represents an important milestone in the history of the school and in the history of business education. The Harvard Business School (HBS) Club of Brazil is joining other alumni clubs around the world in celebrating this historic milestone with a reception and dinner in São Paulo on Monday, November 17, with the participation of Professors Howard Stevenson (HBS Senior Associate Dean and Sarofim-Rock Baker Foundation Professor) and Jim Austin (Eliot I. Snider and Family Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus, and Co-Founder of the HBS Social Enterprise Initiative). For more information, please contact the HBS Club of Brazil (http://www.hbsbrazil.org).
On October 27, Gilmar Mendes, President of the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court, spoke on “Judicial Control of Constitutionality in Brazil” to a captivated audience at the Harvard Law School. The official visit was co-sponsored by the DRCLAS Brazil Studies Program, and featured in the Harvard Crimson (see "In the News" below). Ten other events have already been held this semester in Cambridge organized by the Brazil Studies Program, including a talk on the Brazilian Response to HIV/AIDS featuring Aluisio Segurado (USP Professor and Visiting Research Fellow at the Program on International Health and Human Rights at Harvard). Other recent Fall speakers have included Claudio de Moura Castro (Faculdade Pitágoras); Christopher Dunn (Tulane); Seth Garfield (University of Texas-Austin) Victoria Langland (University of California-Davis); and Rafael Martinez (Vice-Secretary of Education for the State of Rio de Janeiro).
DRCLAS is delighted to announce the renewal of funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for PLALA, the Program for Latin American Libraries and Archives. PLALA's purpose is to strengthen the research base for Latin American Studies by means of small grants to archives and libraries in Latin America that need special funding in order to improve the conditions under which their collections are kept or to expand access to their research holdings. We hope to see increased applications from Brazilian institutions for research collections that are either in acute danger of irreversible losses or simply stagnating due to lack of support.
The number of applications for the second Harvard-Brazil course on infectious diseases nearly doubled at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), where 15 students were picked from a very competitive group. HSPH participants hail from Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, and the US and have a very diverse set of experiences - including one student who recently served two medical tours in Iraq. The Brazilian student selection process is currently being finalized by the Fiocruz - Bahia, and we are delighted to announce a parallel increase in interest and diversity of applicants from throughout Brazil.
In addition to Howard Stevenson and Jim Austin, who will participate in the HBS Centennial celebrations and other University activities in São Paulo, there are more than a dozen Harvard faculty--between October and November only--who either have been or will be travelling to Brazil. Sofia Gruskin from the Harvard School of Public Health spoke on human rights & health at a conference at USP's Medical School, which also hosted Ursula Kaiser from the Harvard Medical School (and Chief of Brigham and Women's Hospital's Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Hypertension). Professors Gruskin and Kaiser both have significant research collaborations with Brazilian counterparts. At least nine professors from the FAS Department of Economics, the Harvard Kennedy School, and HBS will be in Rio de Janeiro to participate in the 2008 Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA) & Latin American Meeting of the Econometric Society (LAMES) meetings. This will be the first time Brazil hosts a LACEA-LAMES conference.
Brazilians in the United States are a relatively new wave of immigrants from South America. This volume offers a broad-ranging discussion of an understudied population and also brings insights into the core issues of immigration research: how immigration can complicate issues of social class, race, and ethnicity, how it intersects with the educational system, and how it fits into the assimilation paradigm. Within the three broad categories, discussions of cultural icons like Carmen Miranda and Carnival, of Brazilian immigrant women, of the new generation, and of the economy of remittances are just a few xamples of the wide range of topics covered in these pages. Read a review in the most recent issue of ReVista (see: www.drclas.harvard.edu/brazil/becomingbrazuca).
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