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Paulo Fontes

Biography

Paulo Fontes is a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (IH-UFRJ), as well as a researcher of the Brazilian Scientific Research Council (CNPq) and the Rio de Janeiro State Research Agency (FAPERJ). At UFRJ, he is the coordinator of the Laboratório de Estudos de História dos Mundos do Trabalho (LEHMT) which leads the most important Brazilian labour history website as public history. In the 1990s, Paulo was a trade union educator.

Paulo received his PhD in Social History from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp) in 2003. Between 1999 and 2000, he was a visiting PhD candidate at University of Manchester. He was a professor at the Fundação Getulio Vargas (2008- 2017). Paulo was also a Visiting Professor at Duke (2004) and Princeton (2006/7) Universities in the US, and Visiting Fellow at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam in 2013 and the re:work Institute of Humboldt University in Berlin (2014). In 2006, alongside Alexandre Fortes, he coordinate the "Memories of Labour", a national program supported by the Brazilian Ministry of Labour. 

Talks and Publications

A historian of Brazilian labour and working-class culture after the World War II, Paulo is the author of several articles, book chapters and books. His book Migration and the Making of Industrial São Paulo (Duke U Press) was the winner of the first Thomas Skidmore Prize, sponsored by the Brazilian National Archive and the Brazilian Studies Association. Currently, Paulo is conducting research on the role of Black trade unionists on the Brazilian labour movement between the 1940s and 1970s. He also coordinates (with Stefan Berger) a project on deindustrialization and social history in Brazil and Germany.