History Professor Jeffrey Lesser on Immigration and Health Policies in Brazil
On the second episode of the Fulbrighter podcast History Professor Jeffrey Lesser discusses his new book, Living and Dying in São Paulo: Immigrants, Health, and the Built Environment in Brazil, published in the U.S by Duke University Press and in Brazil by Editora UNESP.Jeffrey is a Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History at Emory University and his research focuses on the relationships between immigration, ethnicity, and national identity. His latest book focuses in Bom Retiro, a multi-ethnic, working class, neighborhood in the city of São Paulo, to analyze how the state creates and enacts health policies and to ask why different immigrant groups often generate similar responses to state actions. Lesser is the author of a number of prize-winning books published in English, Portuguese, Japanese, and Hebrew and is the winner of multiple teaching awards. He has won national and international fellowships from Fulbright, Fulbright-Hays, the Social Science Research Council, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Research for Living and Dying was supported by fellowships from the Fulbright Scholar Program, the University of São Paulo Institute for Advanced Studies, and Emory University’s Global Health Institute, University Research Council, and Interdisciplinary Faculty Fellowship Program.Jeffrey's book can be downloaded for free in Portuguese here and in English here.