Position Title
Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean history
Affiliated Faculty
José Juan Pérez Meléndez is an Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean history with a specialty on nineteenth-century Brazil, and the Caribbean and Mexico as secondary areas of focus. He is the author of Peopling for Profit in Imperial Brazil: Directed Migrations and the Business of Nineteenth-Century Colonization (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Thematically, his ongoing work ranges widely and includes the study of processes of nineteenth-century colonization and twentieth-/twenty-first-century decolonization; slavery and the illegal slave trade to the Americas; and companies in historical perspective. From a methodological standpoint, his scholarship strives to remain eclectic and multidisciplinary, departing from intellectual and political history toward histories of reading, migration and business history, and environmental studies. More broadly, he is also interested in Latin American essayistic traditions as well as in poetry and poetics. Pérez Meléndez is currently working on a book comparing nineteenth-century monarchies in the Americas and another on the Amazon basin prior to the rubber boom.