Established in 2019 at the College of International Studies, the OU Center for Brazil Studies is a hub for research, teaching and outreach relating to Brazil at the University of Oklahoma.
Our directors and affiliates boast diverse backgrounds in the natural and social sciences, as well as the humanities. Their collective expertise encompasses Brazilian ecology, society, politics, policy, law and culture.
Operating in concert with various OU programs, centers, departments, and colleges, the Center actively collaborates with counterparts in Brazil, including universities, think tanks and public institutions.
The Center provides OU faculty and students with invaluable opportunities to hone Portuguese language skills, cultivate academic knowledge and professional experience, participate in contemporary debates and engage in research endeavors within, about and alongside Brazil.
Our multifaceted initiatives have propelled OU to the forefront of Brazil studies, earning recognition both nationally and internationally.
Brazilian photographer Edgar Xakriabá speaks (alongside activist Casey Camp-Horinek [Ponca] and OU Modern Languages professor Paulo Moreira) at the Brazil Studies event "Images of Environmental Justice in the Americas: An Indigenous Cultural Dialogue," on October 10, 2023.
Fabio de Sa e Silva
Associate Professor of International Studies and Wick Cary Professor of Brazilian Studies, Department of International & Area Studies
Fabio de Sa e Silva has a multidisciplinary background with training in law, social sciences and public policy. He also has over 15 years of experience in policy making and analysis in issues of law and justice in Brazil, where he served at the Ministry of Justice and the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea) and consulted for international organizations like the UNDP, Unesco and the International Bar Association's Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI). He is currently an affiliated fellow of Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession.
Michelle Morais de Sa e Silva
Wick Cary Associate Professor of International & Area Studies, Department of International & Area Studies
Michelle Morais de Sa e Silva teaches courses on public policy, human rights, international development and international cooperation. She has an extensive professional and academic background in human rights and public policy. Her post-doctoral research studies at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government reflect her continuing contributions to the field.
Octavio Acevedo
Associate Professor, School of Meterology
Otavio Acevedo has joined OU in 2023, after 20 years as a professor at Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, Brazil. His researches activities are mainly in atmospheric boundary layer, covering a wide range of applications and tools and including observational, modeling and theoretical studies. He is particularly interested in bringing together observations made at places with different surface characteristics to generalize processes and applying this knowledge to the improvement of turbulence representation in models.
Ian Carillo
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology
Ian Carillo's research focuses on how race and racism shape environmental practices and policies in multi-racial societies, such as Brazil and the U.S. In Brazil, he uses the sugar-ethanol industry as a lens to examine the movements and counter-movements related to policies for equity and sustainability. This research studies worksites as contested terrains, where ideological struggles related to racial and class domination manifest in everyday labor and environmental practices in mills. His methods involve ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews with agribusiness elites, rural labor unions, rural workers, and federal labor regulators.
Leticia Galizzi
Instructor of Portuguese, Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Linguistics
Leticia Galizzi has a Master's summa cum laude in Applied Linguistics in the Teaching of English as a Second Language in public schools from Brazil and an M.F.A. in painting from the University of Oklahoma. She joined the Portuguese program in 2018 as a Graduate Teaching Assistant. Currently, she is an instructor teaching PORT 1115 and PORT 1225. Galizzi is also an artist and a member of the Norman Arts Council. Besides instructing Portuguese at OU, she teaches art at the Firehouse Arts Center in Norman and at Oklahoma City City College.
Misha Klein
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology
Misha Klein is Associate Professor of Anthropology, a core affiliate in Women’s and Gender Studies, and an affiliate in the Departments of Judaic Studies and International and Area Studies (Latin American Studies/Brazil). She is the Chair of the Clyde Snow Social Justice Award Committee, sponsored by OU’s Center for Social Justice, a recipient of the 2019 Oklahoma Universal Human Rights Award, and the 2022 Robert D. Lemon Social Justice Faculty Award. She also received the 2021 Regents' Award for Superior Teaching.
Paulo Moreira
Associate Professor of Portuguese, Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Linguistics
Paulo Moreira has published more than twenty articles on Brazilian, Mexican, U.S., and Latin American literature, cinema, and culture. He has published two books, Localismo Modernista: Faulkner, Guimarães Rosa e Rulfo (Editora UFMG, 2012) and Literary and Cultural Relations Between Brazil and Mexico: Deep Undercurrents (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). He is currently working on a book on imagination and identity and tentatively called Journey into Latin American Imagination. Moreira teaches intermediate Portuguese, Brazilian culture, Cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world, and contemporary Brazilian and Latin American cinema.
Hugo Pereira
Assistant Professor, Department of Health & Exercise Science
Hugpo Pereira holds a B.Sc. in Physical Therapy, M.Sc. in Kinesiology and Ph.D. in Integrative Neuromuscular Physiology and Rehabilitation. He completed a residency in Sports Physical Therapy at the Universidade Federal de São Paulo and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of São Paulo (Laboratory of Biomedical Engineering). His research interests include neuromuscular adjustments during human movement, impact of stress on motor performance, fatigability in health and disease, and age and sex differences during exercise.
Lara Souza
Associate Professor, School of Biological Sciences and Director, Oklahoma Biological Survey
Lara Souza is a plant ecologist who is broadly interested in the role of global change, such as biological invasions and climatic change, in shaping the structure of plant communities and associated ecosystem processes. Her research investigates the role of resource and climatic gradients, and the interplay of such factors, in structuring diversity across and within species in natural plant communities across spatial and temporal scales. Further, she quantifies how diversity, both within and across species, mediates ecosystem properties such as productivity and net ecosystem carbon dioxide exchange in the context of global change.
Ricardo Souza
Lecturer, World Music, School of Music
Ricardo A. Coelho de Souza was born in Belem, Brazil. He is a visiting instructor in world music and percussion at the University of Oklahoma. Ricardo holds a performer's certificate from the Carlos Gomes Conservatory, Bachelor and Master degrees from the University of Missouri, and a DMA from OU. Ricardo was a recipient of the BMI Student Composer Award in 1999 and at OU he received the Ronald J. Dyer Award in percussion, the Michael Hennagin Memorial Scholarship in composition, the Sutton Award in chamber music, and the Gail Boyd de Stwolinski Award for meritorious scholarship and musical performance achievements.
Xiangming Xiao
Professor, School of Biological Sciences; Director, Center for Earth Observation and Modeling, and Associate Director, Institute for Resilient Environmental and Energy Systems (IREES)
Xiangming Xiao is a Professor of Ecology and Remote Sensing at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Oklahoma. He previously worked at the Marine Biology Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts and the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, MIT (1994-1997), and the University of New Hampshire (1997-2008). Dr. Xiao leads the Center for Earth Observation and Modeling (CEOM) at OU, and the Center's research portfolio covers three focused areas: (1) land-cover and land-use change, (2) terrestrial carbon cycle, biodiversity, water resources, and climate, and (3) OneHealth (Human-Animal-Environmental Health) and Planetary Health/GeoHealth.
Mathaus Campos
PhD student, Department of Sociology
Mathaus Campos's research interests include environmental justice, environmental social movements, gender and sexuality.
Guilherme Lopes
Graduate student, School of Music
Bio coming soon
Ronilso Pacheco
Graduate Student, Department of Philosophy
Ronilso Pacheco has an MA in religion and society from the Union Theological Seminary (Columbia University) and a BA from PUC-Rio. He is the author of two books published in Portuguese: "Occupy, Resist, Subvert: church and theology in times of violence, racism and oppression" (2016) and "Black Theology: the anti-racist breath of the Spirit" (2019).
