Dr Daniel McDonald
I am a historian of modern Latin America and the Caribbean with particular expertise in the social, urban, and religious history of Brazil as well as the global history of Catholicism and the Cold War. I currently hold a joint appointment with the Faculty of History and the Oxford School of Global Area Studies through the Latin American Centre. Through my fellowship, I am a member of the “Global Pontificate of Pius XII: Catholicism in a Divided World” research network.
My book manuscript, Peripheral Citizenship: Popular Movements and the Catholic Church in Urban Brazil, is under contract with the University of California Press. Peripheral Citizenship explores how Catholic grassroots movements in São Paulo’s urban periphery negotiated the simultaneous rise of the megacity and the transition from authoritarian to democratic rule. This manuscript goes within these movements to trace how they articulated alternative understandings of rights and democracy while contributing to the emergence of liberation theology across Brazil’s civil-military dictatorship (1964-1985) and the subsequent transition to democracy.
As part of my current fellowship, I am developing two new lines of research on Latin America in Catholicism’s global Cold War. One is the expansive role of the US Catholic Church in Latin America as part of the global Catholic mobilization focused on the region during the Cold War. The other explores Brazilian Catholic Action’s impact on twentieth-century Catholic internationalism. Taken together, these projects examine the interaction of politics and religion across multiple scales from the local to the truly global.
My published work has appeared in the American Historical Review, Hispanic American Historical Review, The Americas, and Journal of Urban History.
Prior to Oxford, I received my PhD in History from Brown University and previously held fellowships at Harvard University and the University of Rochester.
