Research Interests for John D. French

I am an historian of modern Latin America with a specialization in Brazil. Since 2005, I have been working on a book entitled "Lula's Politics of Cunning: From Trade Unionism to the Presidency in Brazil" which draws on a multi-year international research project on “Nurturing Hope, Deepening Democracy, and Combating Inequalities: An Assessment of Lula’s Presidency” that I co-organized (preliminary results have been published in 2012 along with a number of other articles on Lula, Latin American left turns, and working class history in Brazil. My last book entitled "Drowning in Laws: Labor Law and Brazilian Political Culture" was published in 2004.

Keywords:

African diaspora, Brazil, History, labor, Labor, Lula, Political science, PT, transnationalism, WTO

Current projects:

Since 1984, I have been co-coordinator of the Latin American Labor History Conference held in April of each year at Duke, and I served as Director of the Duke Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies from 2001 to December 2005, and as Director of the Carolina and Duke Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies 2002-05. I also serve as Associate Editor for Latin America and the Caribbean for the journal Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas, under its new editor Leon Fink (University of Illinois-Chicago).

Recent Publications

1. French, JD, Epilogue: Authoritarianism and the Specter of Democracy, International Review of Social History, vol. 68 no. 1 (April, 2023), pp. 173-175 [doi]
2. French, JD, Common Men, Exceptional Politicians: What Do We Gain from an Embodied Social Biographical Approach to Leftist Leaders Like Germany's August Bebel and Brazil's Luis Inácio Lula da Silva?, International Review of Social History, vol. 68 no. 1 (April, 2023), pp. 111-121, Cambridge University Press (CUP) [doi] [abs]
3. French, JD, Charisma's Birth from the Bottom Up: Lula, ABC's Metalworkers' Strikes and the Social History of Brazilian Politics, Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 54 no. 4 (November, 2022), pp. 705-729 [doi] [abs]
4. French, JD, Jeffrey L. Gould. Solidarity under Siege: The Salvadoran Labor Movement, 1970–1990., The American Historical Review, vol. 126 no. 4 (February, 2022), pp. 1670-1671, Oxford University Press (OUP) [doi]
5. French, JD, From Dictatorship to the Brazilian New Republic in Crisis: Understanding Lula's Political Leadership, Latin American Politics and Society, vol. 64 no. 1 (February, 2022), pp. 168-173 [doi]