Barbara Weinstein

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Barbara Weinstein is a professor of history at New York University whose research has focused on postcolonial Latin America, particularly Brazil. Her courses and publications explore questions of labor, gender, race, and political economy in regions as diverse as the Amazon and the state of São Paulo, Latin America’s leading industrial center. Weinstein’s current research project considers a period in Brazilian history when the state of São Paulo emerged as the nation’s dominant economic center and political force. Tracing elite and scholarly discourses in this period, she explores the way in which “paulistas” (natives of São Paulo), deploying highly racialized discourses, constructed a notion of São Paulo exceptionalism that produced a hierarchical, almost imperial view of the region’s position within the Brazilian nation. A principal objective of this research is to illuminate the processes by which modernity in Brazil became “racialized” and identified with “whiteness” even as elites proclaimed their nation to be a racial democracy. Weinstein earned her undergraduate degree at Princeton University and her PhD at Yale University. Before moving to NYU, she was on the faculty at Stony Brook University and the University of Maryland, and she has also taught as a Fulbright lecturer at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Brazil) and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her fellowships include awards from the Fulbright-Hays Program, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2007, she served as president of the American Historical Association.