At the start of each academic year, the Harvard-Brazil community comes together to exchange ideas and reconnect. This two-part event will open with flash talks by Harvard faculty members, who will share brief insights into their research and current initiatives related to Brazil. The conversation will then flow into our traditional “Welcome (Back)” networking session, an informal space for Brazilian and Brazilianist students, faculty, and visiting scholars to meet, build new connections, and strengthen existing ties.
Speakers:
Bruno Carvalho, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of African and African American Studies; Co-Director, Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative; Affiliated Professor of Urban Planning and Design, Graduate School of Design.
Gareth Doherty, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture; Affiliate, Department of African and African American Studies.
Lidia Maria Veras Rocha de Moura, Associate Professor, Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Associate Professor of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School.
Moderated by: Marcia Castro, Andelot Professor of Demography, Chair of the Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Chair, Brazil Studies Program - DRCLAS.
Bruno Carvalho specializes in urban life and how cities change. He is the author of The Invention of the Future: A History of Cities in the Modern World (Princeton University Press, forthcoming January 2026). The book begins in the 1750s, when city dwellers and planners started to assume that the future would be radically different from the past. It reframes modern urbanization within a history of competing visions, set against dramatic technological, intellectual, and cultural transformations. The book argues that the “futures of the past” can help us better understand the history of built environments, as well as our own crossroads in an increasingly urban world.
Gareth Doherty, ASLA, takes a human-centered approach to design and theory that aspires to shape environmentally and socially just landscapes. His scholarship advances core knowledge in landscape architecture by applying ethnographic fieldwork and participatory design methodologies. This work critically reassesses 20th-century approaches to landscape studies to inform new pedagogies, tools, and techniques that address contemporary issues of equity, identity, cultural space, and the human impacts of climate change. Through what he calls “landscape fieldwork,” Doherty uncovers diverse landscape narratives that have not yet been formally documented, as reflected in his books Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State (University of California Press, 2017), Landscape Fieldwork: How Engaging the World Can Change Design (University of Virginia Press, 2025), and his recent research on African landscape architecture.
Lidia Maria Veras Rocha de Moura is a clinician, neurologist, and epidemiologist with a subspecialty in advanced general neurology. Her work focuses on caring for patients with complex neurological conditions, including Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD), stroke, traumatic brain injuries, and seizures. Dr. de Moura also specializes in clinical epilepsy and neurophysiology. She holds a Master’s in Public Health and a Ph.D. in Population Health Sciences from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and co-directs the MGH Center for Value-Based Healthcare and Sciences. Her expertise lies in the epidemiology of aging, neuro- and pharmaco-epidemiology methods, and the use of machine learning to improve the quality of real-world data (RWD).
Marcia Castro is the Andelot Professor of Demography, Chair of the Department of Global Health and Population, Director of the Brazil Studies Program at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) at Harvard University, Associate Faculty at the Harvard University Center for the Environment, and a faculty member at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. Her research focuses on the development and use of multidisciplinary approaches to identify the determinants of infectious disease transmission in diverse ecological settings, with the goal of informing control policies. She has more than 20 years of research experience in the Brazilian Amazon, with extensive household survey work and a deep understanding of local cultures. She has also collaborated for over 15 years with Brazilian researchers, health secretariats, and the Ministry of Health, particularly on infectious diseases. Currently, Castro leads projects on malaria, COVID-19, arboviruses, infant and child mortality, development, and climate change in the Brazilian Amazon. Her work includes assessing the spatiotemporal patterns of COVID-19 spread in Brazil, mortality and fertility changes due to the pandemic, risk factors for mortality, and vaccine effectiveness.
LOCATION:CGIS - S010 Tsai Auditorium STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20250905T200000Z DTEND:20250905T220000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR