Dr Daniel McDonald

I am a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean whose research centers on modern Brazil and the global history of Catholicism. My current work explores issues of citizenship, liberation theology, cities, popular and transnational social movements, and the Cold War. I also publish on the digital and public humanities and conduct projects involving participatory community-based digitization and spatial analysis.

At Oxford, I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in the history of Catholicism in Latin America. As part of the role, I am an affiliate of the Latin American Centre and "The Global Pontificate of Pius XII: Catholicism in a Divided World" research network. Before coming to Oxford, I held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University and the University of Rochester. I received my PhD in Latin American and Caribbean History from Brown University.

Research Interests

• Citizenship and Inequality
• Global History of Catholicism
• Urban History
• Migration
• The Cold War

I am interested in how non-elite actors constructed novel understandings of rights and democracy in twentieth-century Latin America, especially through religion. My current 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. Drawing on a collaborative digitization project and over fifty oral histories, Peripheral Citizenship goes within these movements to trace how they articulated alternative understandings of rights and democracy and contributed to the emergence of liberation theology across Brazil’s civil-military dictatorship (1964-1985) and the subsequent transition to democracy.

Increasingly, this research has taken on a global scope.  As part of my fellowship at Oxford, I have developed lines of research exploring the rise of Catholic internationalism "from the south" through a transnational history of Brazilian Catholic Action and another on the expansive role of the US Catholic Church in Latin America in the Cold War. 

I am currently involved in two collaborative publications. The first is as co-editor of a thematic edition of Latin American Perspectives, “Revisiting the Democratic Transition in Brazil.” See the CFP here. The second is as co-editor of an edited volume on Catholicism and the Cold War in Latin America.

My work in the digital and public humanities centers on collaborative archiving and digitization as well as spatial analysis. I oversaw the Grassroots Archive Digital Initiative, an effort to organize and digitize historical documents held by social movements in São Paulo for the Centro de Memória Urbana at the Universidade Federal de São Paulo – Campus Zona Leste. An article on this experience was published in the American Historical Review. I am also a co-investigator for Favelas.br, a network of favela associations and allied academics that supports community-based archiving and digitization projects and the development of co-production methodologies. Forthcoming in the American Historical Review is a video essay that draws on Urban Intermedia to examine visual lexicons of resilience in hand-drawn illustrations found on social movement paraphernalia in São Paulo. A written article examines and contextualizes the video essay.

You can follow me on my personal website and on Twitter @DanMcDonaldDM