Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Delaware
2020 to 2021
Research Fellow
Hunger Politics during the Early Cold War: Intellectuals from the Global South Contest the Overpopulation Paradigm, 1948-1973
I will conduct research in five U.S. archives that hold the papers of individuals who were centrally involved in defining the problem of overpopulation when that first became a widespread global concern following the Second World War. The chosen archives, three of which are Consortium members, are repositories of the records of individuals or organizations that were centrally involved in solidifying a commitment to “overpopulation” as a global concern during the early decades of the Cold War. Working in these collections will complement research I conducted two summers ago in northeast Brazil, examining the papers of Brazilian physician and nutritionist Josué de Castro who was a prominent opponent of overpopulation discourse from 1948 until his death in 1973. The U.S. archives allow me to examine the careers and ideas of De Castro’s most powerful opponents in global debates about overpopulation during the early Cold War.