My research is primarily devoted to modern Brazilian literary and cultural studies with a particular focus on the period of military rule between 1964 and 1985. I have developed a multidisciplinary approach, involving the analysis of literary texts, visual culture, cinema, and especially popular music, a field of heightened symbolic value in Brazilian cultural history.

My first book Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture was the first English-language treatment of Tropicália, widely acknowledged as the most important Brazilian cultural movement of the last half century. I situated the tropicalist movement in relation to an avant-garde tradition going back to Oswald de Andrade’s antropofagia (i.e. cultural cannibalism) of the late 1920s, which proposed a radical critique of the conservative legacy of Portuguese colonialism, while articulating a will to “devour” cultural practices and ideas from Europe and the United States. With manifestations in visual/conceptual art, cinema, theater, literature, and popular music, Tropicália erupted in 1968, a watershed year in culture and politics in several national contexts. It coincided with mass protests and the emergence of an armed opposition movement, which gave rise to a fiercely anti-communist hard line faction within the regime that remained in power until the mid-1970s. The military regime followed a program of conservative modernization, which stimulated capitalist growth, industrialization, and the expansion of mass media, while restricting labor demands and political rights, thereby further exacerbating social inequalities. In artworks, songs, films, and plays, the tropicalists produced elaborate allegories of Brazilian society that focused on the stark contradiction between modernity and underdevelopment in the context of authoritarian rule. Despite its brevity, Tropicália would have a deep and lasting impact on several artistic realms and would serve in subsequent years as a point of reference for the youth counterculture in Brazil.

With support from a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2013-14), I completed my second book, Contracultura: Alternative Arts and Social Transformation in Authoritarian Brazil, which is a logical extension of Brutality Garden. While my first book focused on a small group of artists in the late 1960s, my second book examines the Brazilian counterculture from a wider angle as both a social as well as cultural movement during the 1970s. While scholarship on Latin America during the Cold War has traditionally focused on revolutionary insurgency and state-sponsored counterinsurgency, Contracultura examines other dimensions of social dissent and artistic experimentation characterized as “alternative,” “marginal,” or “underground” during this period. Drawing on a diverse corpus of source material, including literary texts (poems, experimental prose, short fiction), songs, films, artworks, photographs, cartoons, police records, censorship files, and alternative journalism, my book explores the impact of the counterculture on alternative lifestyles, the artistic avant-garde, and popular culture. The second half of the book explores the relationship between the counterculture and emergent social movements that would challenge conservative attitudes toward gender, sexuality, and race. One chapter focuses on “Black Rio,” an Afro-Brazilian urban counterculture revolving around soul music that was heavily influenced by post-Civil Rights Black Power movements in the US, which was a harbinger of an organized black political mobilization toward the end of the 1970s. Another chapter reveals the connections between the counterculture and an emergent gay movement that sought to challenge the patriarchal values and sexual mores promoted by the regime and its allies. Contracultura received an Honorable Mention, 2017 Brazil Section Award from the Latin American Studies Association and was Co-Winner of the 2017 Roberto Reis Book Award from the Brazilian Studies Association.

In addition to my monographs on cultural and social movements during the period of authoritarian rule, I have co-edited two volumes of scholarly essays related to Brazilian popular music, an artistic field that has for long interested literary scholars and cultural historians. The first volume, Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization, co-edited with Charles Perrone, addressed a diverse range of topics, including Carmen Miranda’s reception in the US, the impact of bossa nova on jazz, Tropicália and psychedelic rock, Brazilian heavy metal, and Afro-Diasporic genres, such as reggae and funk. The second volume, Brazilian Popular Music and Citizenship, co-edited with Idelber Avelar, examined music as a resource for claiming social, political, and cultural rights in Brazil. These essays consider Brazilian popular music in relation to national identity, social class, race, political protest, and forms of distribution and consumption. My own contribution to this volume examined the discourse around citizenship in the work of Tom Zé (Antonio José Santana Martins, b. 1936), a participant in the tropicalist movement who has reflected on the meaning of modern citizenship in Brazil throughout his career spanning over half a century.

The remarkable career of Tom Zé is the focus of my current book project, Stray Dog in the Milky Way: Tom Zé and Brazilian Popular Music. While focused on one artist, this project will tell a larger story with a longer narrative arc about modernity, migration, citizenship, and culture in Brazil.

I was born in Bulgaria and grew up in Varna, a resort town and a large port on the Black Sea. After graduating from the English Language High School in Varna in 1994, I came to the United States to pursue a bachelor’s degree at Franklin and Marshall College. In 1998, I graduated from Franklin and Marshall College with a double major in Government and French and a minor in Asian Studies. After Franklin and Marshall, I moved to Stanford in September 1998 to pursue a PhD in Political Science. My dissertation field research took me to China (where I spent 18 months taking advanced Chinese and conducting fieldwork in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong), Taiwan, Russia, the Czech Republic, and France. I completed my dissertation in the fall of 2003 (my PhD was conferred in March 2004) and spent Spring 2004 on a post-doctoral fellowship at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard.

In July 2004, I moved to Dartmouth College to begin a tenure-track appointment as Assistant Professor of Government. During my years at Dartmouth, my research was supported through an An Wang Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Research at Harvard (2005-2006) and a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2010-2011). In July 2011, I accepted a tenured appointment as Associate Professor of Political Science at Tulane University. After moving to Tulane, I was appointed Distinguished Guest Fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study (August-December 2011) and received a Berlin Prize, which allowed me to spend January-June 2012 as an Axel Springer Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. In 2011-2013, I was also a member of a cohort of twenty young China scholars selected by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations to participate in the Public Intellectuals Program. I received visiting fellowships from the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki (which allowed me to spend August 2013, May-June 2014, and May 2016 in Finland) and a fellowship from the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, which made it possible to spend 2016-17 at Princeton. I have used these grants to advance my research on China and on comparative authoritarianism.

Having served as Director of the Asian Studies Program in 2014-16, I am currently Associate Professor of Political Science at Tulane. I am also a non-resident Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard and Chair of the Resilience of Authoritarianism Working Group at the Holbrooke Forum for the Study of Diplomacy and Governance Statecraft in the 21st Century at the American Academy in Berlin. In addition, I currently serve as the Associate Editor for Asia of the journal Problems of Post-Communism.

My research so far has resulted in a book that was published by Cambridge University Press in 2009 (Piracy and the State: The Politics of Intellectual Property Rights in China); in an edited volume that was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013 (Why Communism Did Not Collapse: Understanding Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Asia and Europe); in a book on the political logic of socialist consumption published in Bulgarian by Ciela Publishers in 2018 (Politicheskata logika na sotsialisticheskoto potreblenie); in a special issue on Media Control in China (published by Problems of Post-Communism in 2017); and in journal articles and book chapters published in English, Chinese, Bulgarian, Hungarian, and German. Currently, my top research priority is to complete a book manuscript entitled Dictatorship and Information: Autocratic Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China and two edited volumes: Popular Authoritarianism: The Quest for Regime Durability and China-Cuba: Trajectories of Post-Revolutionary Governance.

I am not a Latin Americanist, but I have a strong interest in Cuba, where I have conducted fieldwork in 2013 and 2015. My fascination with Cuba stems from the opportunity it offers us to think about comparative communism (this is the intellectual impetus behind China-Cuba: Trajectories of Post-Revolutionary Governance, one of the edited volumes I am currently working on) and about the tools that are used by the regime to ensure regime resilience (this led to my article “The Functions of Letters to the Editor in Reform-Era Cuba,” which is forthcoming in the Latin American Research Review in March 2019).

My historical research focuses on the role of technology—and cultural ideologies behind technological developments—in shaping modern Brazil and its frontiers. My book manuscript titled “Flight of the Toucans: Aeronautics and Colonization in Brazil’s Frontiers” explores the role of science and technology, especially aviation, in the colonization of Brazil’s vast frontiers. It shows how popular culture, positivistic elites, and a technocratic state came together in an almost religious belief that aviation was a solution to many of Brazil’s problems, and that the technology’s ability to conquer large distances would integrate the country’s distant territories. These ideological notions about aviation shaped the very development of the technology in Brazil. The application of these technocratic solutions, the book argues, created a unique frontier, with distant locations connected primarily by air, and where flying was commonplace for indigenous peoples.

I have also written about what I call “guerilla technologies,” technical know-how and practices created by technicians and inventors at the margins of society and developed outside of, and often in conflict with, formal technologies and authorities. My forthcoming article “Fire in the Skies: Guerrilla Technologies, the Environment and Airspace in Brazil” (in Technology and Culture) explores this concept by following the history and contemporary practices of baloeiros, artisans mostly in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo who practice the illegal art of launching hot air balloons. I have also written and directed a documentary film about the cultural phenomenon of criminalized hot air ballooning in Brazil.

I also have a strong interest in digital humanities and its applications in research, teaching, and public history. I have developed an app called CuratAR that makes augmented reality accessible to a much wider public without any technical training. The app allows users to select target images, such as photographs or paintings in museum, or signage in historical sites, and add new information such as scholarly text, videos, photos and maps to be displayed over the real world in augmented reality. I am also currently working on a project to build an affordable device (under $50) for digitizing historical materials on the field. It is tentatively called the “Pocket Archivist” and it will be used to crowdsource the preservation of historical materials in community or personal archives, or to affordably digitize historical collections that might be at risk of destruction.

As a strong believer in the importance of public scholarship, I was a co-founder and managing editor of The Appendix: A Journal of Narrative & Experimental History, which created a new forum to bridge the gap between academic and popular publishing for the humanities—bringing academics from different fields together with artists and journalists to produce high quality history writing for broad audiences. The Appendix reached over a million readers, and its articles have been featured by major publications such as The New Yorker, National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, The Atlantic and The Paris Review.

Arielle Crook graduate from the Stone Center with an M.A. in May 2020. She attended Xavier University of Louisiana as a pre-medical student and earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Biology in 2018. Throughout her travels to countries, such as Haiti, Costa Rica, Cuba, and Brazil, Arielle developed her unique understanding of global citizenship, holistic wellness, and the various religious traditions of the African diaspora. As a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) scholar, Arielle used her time at the Stone Center to explore the various uses of plants and other healing modalities in African-derived religions in Brazil while utilizing her skills as a visual and movement artist to engage with her international and local communities. In her thesis, “At the Intersection of Health, Healing, and Justice: Analyzing the African Botanical Legacy in Brazil,” Arielle uses an ethnobotanical lens to explore the various uses of plants as medicine. Her work raises questions regarding the political definitions of health and justice for Afro-descendants in Brazil, thus unearthing narratives surrounding resistance, healing, and cultural continuity. She aspires to create a professional research career centered on creating bridges between people of the Africa diaspora through transatlantic dialogue to facilitate conversations based on healing through plant medicine, storytelling, and creative movement.