#  History and Ecology in the Territorial Imagination of the Brazilian Cerrado 

 



    ![decorative image](/sites/g/files/omnuum12451/files/styles/hwp_5_4__480x385/public/2025-01/Cerrado%20Goi%C3%A1s.jpg?itok=DTvrjEMc) 

 



 

####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **February 13, 2025** 

 12:00PM - 01:30PM EST 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **CGIS South, Room S216**  



 

 



 

The Brazilian national territory has traditionally been analyzed in terms of large biogeographic regions, in which the classification of biomes is the current and the most widely used for planning, development, and environmental conservation purposes in Brazil. The Amazon and the Cerrado are the two largest Brazilian biomes and occupy more than 70% of Brazil’s surface area. In contrast to the Amazon, the Cerrado has been considered by the government as a biome to be sacrificed or essentially have its environment exploited by the expansion of large-scale intensified agriculture. By drawing on environmental history, Dutra e Silva seeks to analyze the different historical perceptions of this biome, involving ecological and political assumptions that have been incorporated over the years and defined the Cerrado as a blooming frontier.

##### Speaker

**Sandro Dutra e Silva,** Visiting Scholar, Department of the History of Science; Professor at Universidade Evangélica de Goiás and Universidade Estadual de Goiás

##### Moderator

**Gabriela Soto Laveaga**, Professor of the History of Science; Antonio Madero Professor for the Study of Mexico

##### About the Speaker

**Sandro Dutra e Silva** has a PhD in History from the University of Brasília (UnB). He is a professor and researcher at the Evangelical University of Goiás and the State University of Goiás. Coordinator of the Cerrado Environmental History Laboratory. He served as a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles (2015-2016) and is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Department of History of Science at Harvard University (2024-2025).

He is editor-in-chief of HALAC, the Sociedad Latinoamericana y Caribeña de Historia Ambiental (SOLCHA) journal. He edited some collections, including Environmental History (volumes I, II, and III), published in Brazil between 2012 and 2020 (Rio de Janeiro: Garamond). Author of several articles on Brazil's agrarian and environmental history, emphasizing the Cerrado biome. Author of the work "No Oeste a Terra e o Céu: a Expansão da Fronteira Agrícola no Brasil Central" (Rio de Janeiro: Mauad X, 2017). His studies have sought to analyze the relationship between society and nature in Central Brazil, dialoguing with the history of agriculture, science, and environmental history.

##### About the Moderator

**Gabriela Soto Laveaga** is Professor of the History of Science and Antonio Madero Professor for the Study of Mexico at Harvard University. Her current research interests interrogate knowledge production and circulation between Mexico and India; medical professionals and social movements; and science and development projects in the twentieth century.

Her first book, Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects and the Making of the Pill, won the Robert K. Merton Best Book prize in Science, Knowledge, and Technology Studies from the American Sociological Association. Her second monograph, Sanitizing Rebellion: Physician Strikes, Public Health and Repression in Twentieth Century Mexico, examines the role of healthcare providers as both critical actors in the formation of modern states and as social agitators. Her latest book project seeks to re-narrate histories of twentieth century agriculture development aid from the point of view of India and Mexico.

She has held numerous fellowships, including those from the Ford, Mellon, Fulbright, DAAD, and Gerda Henkel Foundations and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. In 2019, she received the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence In Mentoring Award from Harvard University.



 

 



 

 See also:- [ Cambridge ](/locations/cambridge-office)
- [ Brazil Studies ](/programs-initiatives/brazil-studies)
 
 

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