Courtney Campbell

I was born and raised in southeast Michigan (USA). After completing graduate studies, I joined the Peace Corps as an agroforestry extension volunteer, which took me to Paraguay (2001-2003). In Paraguay, I lived and worked in a dairy community in the Chaco.  From Paraguay, I moved to Recife in Brazil (2003-2008), where I taught English and began postgraduate training. I returned to the United States to earn my doctorate in Nashville, Tennessee (2008-2014). I carried out thesis research in nine Brazilian states with funding from the Institute for International Education in 2012. Before joining the University of Birmingham, I held two postdoctoral positions: the first a Past and Present Postdoctoral Fellowship (2014-2015) housed at the Institute of Historical Research in London, and the second an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship (2015-2016, through Vanderbilt’s Mellon Partners Programme) at Tougaloo College, a historically black college (HBCU) in Jackson, Mississippi. I joined the University of Birmingham in Autumn 2016.

I am a social and cultural historian, focusing on Latin America.

In my book Region out of Place: The Brazilian Northeast and the World (1924-1968), published with the Latin America Series of University of Pittsburgh Press in 2022, I analyze how Brazilians discussed the meaning of belonging to the northeastern region in the early- to mid-twentieth century. My book has led to interviews or publications with BBC Brasil, The New Books Network, The Conversation, and History Today (November 2022).

I am currently working on two books. The first, provisionally titled Rebellious Women and the Brazilian Nation, focuses on representations of Brazil’s iconic historical women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second, provisionally titled Raising Anita: Mothering, Other-Mothering, and Anti-fascism in Twentieth-Century Germany, Mexico, Brazil, and Beyond, focuses on Anita Prestes, child of Olga Benário Prestes (a militant Jewish, German, communist woman) and Luís Carlos Prestes (who would come to be leader of the Brazilian Communist Party). After a failed communist uprising in Brazil, Olga was deported to Germany, gave birth to Anita in a women’s prison, and, ultimately, was murdered in a Nazi extermination camp. Anita was raised by her grandmother and aunt, Leocádia and Lygia (respectively), who would carry her from country to country in exile. This book focuses on the networks they relied on and forged to raise Anita.

I have also co-edited a volume titled Empty Spaces: Confronting Emptiness in National, Cultural, and Urban History, with Allegra Giovine and Jennifer Keating. This publication also led to a New Books Network interview. I am currently working on another edited volume titled Brazilian Regionalism in a Global Context with my co-editor Dr Glen Goodman of Arizona State University. I have published articles in Past & Present, Slavery & Abolition, and the Luso-Brazilian Review.