Andrew G. Britt

I am a historian of contemporary Latin America and a digital scholarship developer with a national focus on Brazil. I work as an Assistant Professor in the Division of Liberal Arts at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. My research is based in the city of São Paulo, Brazil - a frenetic, magnetic metropolis of more than 20 million. I completed my PhD at Emory University in 2018, which was awarded honorable mention for Best Dissertation in the Humanities (Antonio Candido Prize) by the Latin American Studies Association Brazil Section. I am currently revising the thesis into a book, titled The Paradoxes of Ethnoracial Space in São Paulo, 1930s-1980s.

In my digital humanities work I am interested in the intersection of spatial computing and history, especially augmented reality and collaborative mapping projects that advance racial equity throughout the Americas. In 2022 I was awarded a Project Development Grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. In the same year I served as a dramaturg for Marina Zurita's production Mother Tongue, which chronicled the lives of waste pickers in São Paulo.

britta@uncsa.edu or andrewgbritt@gmail.com

Publications

“Spatial Projects of Forgetting: Razing the Remedies Church and Museum to the Enslaved in São Paulo’s ‘Black Zone,’ 1930s-’40s”, Journal of Latin American Studies, August 2022 (First View)

“Praça Luiza Mahin, Brasilândia, São Paulo (SP),” Lugares de Memória dos Trabalhadores, Laboratório de História dos Mundos do Trabalho, September 29, 2021.

“Re/Mapping São Paulo’s Geographies of African Descent,” Items: Insights from the Social Sciences, Social Science Research Council, February 25, 2020.

Co-Author, “Pauliceia 2.0: A Computational Platform for Collaborative Historical Research,” Proceedings XVIII GEOINFO, December 4th-6th, 2017, Salvador, BA, Brazil, 28-39.

Invited Reviewer of John F. Collins, Revolt of the Saints: Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian Racial Democracy, H-LatAm, Special Edition on Race in Brazil.

Contributing Author and Assistant Editor, Matthew Gutmann and Jeffrey Lesser, eds. Global Latin America: Into the Twenty-First Century (UC Press, 2016).

Digital Humanities

Researcher and Developer, Seeking Displacement: Remapping São Paulo's Geographies of African Descent (in production)

Researcher (2017- Present), Pauliceia 2.0: A Spatiotemporal Platform for the Digital Humanities

Research Fellow (2015-'16), Voyages: the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database

Project Developer, Windows into English Avenue and Vine City

Courses Offered at UNCSA, Northwestern U., and Emory U.

"Just Code: Programmable Ethics for the Digital Age"

"The History of the Future: Brazil"

"The Afterlives of Slavery"

"Latin American History through Film"

"Bulldozed: São Paulo and Chicago"

"From City of Gold to City of God: Placing Latin America's Past"

"Hitchhiking the Atlantic"