Sueann Caulfield is Professor of History and Professor in the Residential College, Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History, and Co-Director of the Global Feminisms Project at the University of Michigan. She specializes in the history of modern Brazil, with emphasis on gender and sexuality. Her first book,In Defense of Honor: Morality, Modernity, and Nation in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil (Duke University Press, 2000) dealt with the meaning of honor in Brazilian law and popular culture. She has co-edited a volume that looks as how honor changed in Latin America from the colonial to the national periods: Honor, Status, and Law in Modern Latin American History (Duke, 2005). Professor Caulfield has also published a variety of works in both U.S. and Brazilian journals on the topic of gender and historiography, family, race, and sexuality in Brazil. She is currently working on a social history of the concept of legitimacy in twentieth-century Brazil.
Recent Courses
Social and Cultural Theories in the Twentieth Century Social Sciences
Family Ties: Honor, Sexualilty and Law in Latin American History
The Idea of Universal Law: European Theories and Regional Practices
Selected Articles
2005 “The Changing Politics of Freedom and Virginity in Rio de Janeiro, 1920-1940,” in Honor, Status, and Law in Modern Latin American History (Durham: Duke University Press), 223-245.
2004 “Interracial Courtship in the Rio de Janeiro Courts, 1918-1940,” in ejandra Rosemblatt (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 163-1 in Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, ed. Nancy Appelbaum, Anne S. Macpherson, and Karin Al86.
2003 “La importancia del color em la sexualidade y el matrimonio: evidencias halladas en expediented judiciales de crímenes sexuales en Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 1918-1940,” in Género y Cultura en América Latina: Arte, Historia y estudios de Género, ed. Luzelena Gutiérrez de Velasco (Mexico City: El Colegio de México/UNESCO), 281-314.
2001 “The History of Gender in Latin American Historiography,” keynote essay, Hispanic American Historical Review, 81, no. 3-4 (2001): 451-492.
Books Published
In Defense of Honor: Morality, Modernity, and Nation in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
Honor, Status, and Law in Modern Latin American History, co-edited with Sarah Chambers and Lara Putnam (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
