Dr. Joan L. Bak

Professor of History
318 Ryland Hall
Office: (804) 289-8335
Fax: (804) 287-1992

Currently completing: Working with Collective Identities in Brazil: To "Incorporate the Proletariat" in Rio Grande do Sul, 1889-1930. This study explores the ways that workers juggle multiple identities -- of class and race, gender and ethnicity, region and nation - as they try to negotiate Brazil's first decades of industrialization. It considers how those identities are imagined and shaped in both discourse and practice, by both elite and popular agency, under the specific constraints of local conditions. The project is designed to produce new understandings of the history of urban labor and to use these new understandings to rethink the enduring roots of labor populism in modern Latin America.

Teaching:
Latin America, Brazil

Research:
Latin America, Brazil

Education:
Yale, Ph.D., 1977

Selected Publications:
"Classe, etnicidade e gênero no Brasil: a negociação de identidade dos trabalhadores na Greve do 1906, em Porto Alegre." Métis:história & cultura (Revista de História da Universidade de Caxias do Sul) 2:4 (jul/dez. 2003), 181-224.

"Race, respectability and reformist workers in Porto Alegre, 1908-1913." História: Debates e tendências. VI Encontro Estadual de História--ANPUH/RS, 4:1 (julho 2003), 65-72.

"O Homem do Livro: 'Esta é a minha Bíblia,'" in John D. French, Afogados em leis: A CLT e a cultura política dos trabalhadores brasileiros (São Paulo: Editora Fundação Perseu Abramo, 2001), 123-27.

"Incorporating "The Proletariat" in Brazil's First Republic: Founding Moments in Rio Grande do Sul, 1889-1892," Proceedings of the American Historical Association, 2000, reference # 10485, 2000.

"Class, Ethnicity and Gender in Brazil: The Negotiation of Workers"'Identities in Porto Alegre's 1906 Strike of 21 Days." Latin American Research Review, 35:3 (August 2000), 83-123. Awarded Honorable Mention for the Conference on Latin American History Prize, 2000.

"Labor, Community and the Making of a Cross-Class Alliance in Brazil: The 1917 Railroad Strikes in Rio Grande do Sul," Hispanic American Historical Review 78:2 (May 1998), 179-227. Nominated by the HAHR editors for the 1998 Berkshire Conference of Women's Historians Article Prize.

"Political Centralization and the Building of the Interventionist State in Brazil: Corporatism, Regionalism and Interest Group Politics in Rio Grande do Sul, 1930-1937," The Luso-Brazilian Review, XXII (Summer 1985), 9-25.

"Cartels, Cooperatives, and Corporatism: Getúlio Vargas in Rio Grande do Sul on the Eve of Brazil's 1930 Revolution."  The Hispanic American Historical Review, LXIII (May 1983), 255-275.