Victoria Langland

Victoria Langland holds a joint position in History and Romance Languages and Literatures and is currently serving as the Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Brazil Initiative.  She specializes in twentieth-century Latin American history, especially the Southern Cone, and writes about gender, dictatorship, the uses of memory, student and other social movements, and, more generally, the intersections of culture and power. She is the author of Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil (Duke University Press, 2013) and the co-editor of The Brazil Reader: History, Culture, Politics, 2nd edition, (Duke University Press, 2019) and Monumentos, Memoriales y Marcas Territoriales (Siglo XXI, 2003).

Langland's current research project is a history of breastfeeding in Brazil that looks at how cultural understandings, public policies, formula marketing and other factors have transformed popular beliefs and practices about infant nutrition and women’s bodies over time.  Before coming to the University of Michigan, she was on the faculty at the University of California, Davis and at Lafayette College.

Selected Publications:

Books

The Brazil Reader: History, Culture, Politics, 2nd edition, co-edited with James N. Green and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz (Duke University Press, 2019)

Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil (Duke University Press, 2013)

Monumentos, Memoriales y Marcas Territoriales, co-edited with Elizabeth Jelin (Siglo XXI, 2003)

Articles

“Transnational connections of the global sixties as seen by a historian of Brazil,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties: Between Protest and Nation Building, eds. Chen Jian, Martin Klimke, Masha Kirasirova, Mary Nolan, Marilyn Young, Joanna Waley-Cohen, eds., Routledge Press: Abingdon, UK, 2018, 15-26.

“Coming Home to Praia de Flamengo: The Once and Future National Student Union Headquarters in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.” In Telling Ruins in Latin America, eds. Michael J. Lazzara and Vicky Unruh. Palgrave Macmillan (2009): 219-228.

“Birth Control Pills and Molotov Cocktails: Reading Sex and Revolution in 1968 Brazil.” In In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War, eds. Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser. Durham: Duke University Press (2008): 308-349.

“Il est Interdite d’Interdire: The Transnational Experience of 1968 in Brazil.” Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, Vol 17, N°1 (2006).

“Where the Past Seeks the Future: Sculpture, Memory and ‘Never Again.’” Sculpture Review IV:4 (2006).

Affiliation(s)

• Romance Lanaguages
• History
• Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies