Jeffrey D. Needell

portrait humanities original cropped
Professor of History at University of Florida

Jeffrey D. Needell received his Ph.D. (Latin American and European cultural history) from Stanford University in 1982, his M.A. (Latin American and colonial African history) from Yale University in 1977, and his A.B. (history) from the University of California at Berkeley in 1974. He joined the Department of History at the University of Florida in 1987 after teaching at the University of Oregon in 1982-1985 and serving as an administrator in the Latin American Program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (Washington, D.C.) in 1985-1987.

He has been a Visiting Assistant Professor at The Catholic University (Washington, D.C., United States), a Visiting Fulbright Lecturer at the Federal Fluminense University (Niterói, Brazil), and a Visiting Professor of Brazilian Studies at the University of Leiden, (The Netherlands). Needell has published more than thirty articles and anthology chapters on Brazilian urban cultural history, intellectual history, and on the Brazilian monarchy and slavery and the movement for slavery’s abolition (1879-1888). Much of his research has been supported by fellowships from Fulbright-Hays, the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Philosophical Society. He is the author of  A Tropical Belle Epoque: Elite Society and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Rio de Janeiro (Cambridge University Press, 1987; translated and published in Brazil, 1993, and Argentina, 2013) and The Party of Order: The Conservatives, the State, and Slavery in the Brazilian Monarchy, 1831-1871 (Stanford University Press, 2006). He edited Emergent Brazil: Key Perspectives on a New Global Power University Press of Florida, 2015). His most recent book is The Sacred Cause:  The Abolitionist Movement, Afro-Brazilian Mobilization, and Imperial Politics in Rio de Janeiro published by (Stanford University Press, 2020). Needell teaches general courses on the history of Latin America after 1750, more specific courses on the history of Brazil and the history of Amazonia, and the Department’s graduate seminar on Brazilian historiography.