Dr Daniel McDonald

Daniel McDonald is a Fulford Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College with a joint appointment in the OSGA Latin American Centre and Faculty of History. 

He is a historian of modern Latin America and global Catholicism whose research explores the dynamic interplay between political mobilization and transnational Catholic networks in the Cold War Americas.

McDonald recently published his first book, Peripheral Citizenship: Popular Movements and the Progressive Catholic Church in Urban Brazil (University of California Press, 2026). 

Peripheral Citizenship rewrites the history of citizenship in Latin America by demonstrating that the urban periphery became a vibrant laboratory for new visions of rights, democracy, and the Catholic Church itself. Connecting the global and local, the book traces how rural migrants and clergy engaged a changing global Church and unequal urbanization in São Paulo’s periphery across Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985) and post-1985 democratic transition.

At Oxford, he is currently working on two lines of research as part of the “Global Pontificate of Pius XII” project based at the German Historical Institute in Rome. 

The first is a transnational history of the globalization of the Latin American Catholic Church through personnel deployments from Europe, North America, and the Pacific during the Cold War. 

The second is a global history of Catholic internationalism ‘from the south.’

This research draws on fieldwork at the Vatican and over twenty archives across the Americas, Europe, and the Pacific. Further support for this work has come from the American Philosophical Society, the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust, and the Oxford U. Press Fell Fund.

Prior to Oxford, he received my PhD in History from Brown University and held fellowships at Harvard University and the University of Rochester.