Since the mid-1990s I have conducted ethnographic research on UNESCO world heritage sites, urban restoration programs, and their relationships to national histories and racial politics in Brazil. This gave rise to my first book, Revolt of the Saints: Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian 'Racial Democracy.' In addition to ongoing work on heritage, race and ethnographic approaches to history and historicity in Latin America, I am currently involved in two new projects. The first, Under English Eyes, examines the ways Africans who arrived on the final slave ship to dock in the city of Salvador, Bahia experienced Brazil's 19th century transition to ostensibly free labor. The second, Hunters of the Sourlands, is a somewhat iconoclastic foray into human-animal relations and the politics of property and nature in the contemporary U.S. The project is based on experiences with hunters of white-tail deer, state game officials, and scientists involved in wildlife biology in central New Jersey. Its goal is to understand more clearly how recent economic changes have altered landscapes in ways that affect both national politics and the ecology of North American woodlands.

In addition to my research and teaching, I currently serve as an Editorial Board Member and Film and Book Review Editor for Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology and as Co-Chair of the Columbia University Brazil Seminar. Additionally, I am honored to report that in Fall 2012 I began directing Queens College's Program in Latin American and Latino Studies. LALS plays an extremely important and promising role in the intellectual life of Queens as a College and Queens as a borough. I look forward to working with all members of our multiple communities in making this vital program central to the concerns of students, faculty, and people throughout New York and the Americas.

In Press. The Revolt of the Saints: Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian "Racial Democracy." Duke University Press.

In Press. "Reconstructing the 'Cradle of Brazil:' The Detachability of Morality and the Nature of Cultural Labor in Salvador, Bahia's Pelourinho World Heritage Site." International Journal of Cultural Property.

2011. "Melted Gold and National Bodies: The Hermeneutics of Depth and the Value of History in Brazilian Racial Politics." American Ethnologist 38(4): 683-700.

2011. "Culture, Content, and the Enclosure of Human Being: UNESCO's 'Intangible' Heritage in the New Millennium." Radical History Review, Number 109 (Winter): 121-135.

2011. "Nation-State Consolidation and Cultural Patrimony." The Brazilian State: Paths and Prospects of Dirigisme and Liberalization, eds. Mauricio Font and Laura Randall: Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, pp. 219-246.

2009. "Historical and Cultural Patrimony in Brazil: Recent Works in Portuguese." Latin American Research Review 44(1): 291-301.

2008. "'But What if I Should Need to Defecate in Your Neighborhood, Madame?': Empire, Redemption and the 'Tradition of the Oppressed' in a Brazilian Historical Center." Cultural Anthropology 23(2): 279-328.

2008. "Patrimony, Public Health, and National Culture: The Commodification and Redemption of Origins in Neoliberal Brazil." Critique of Anthropology (28)2: 237-255.

2008. "A razão barroca do patrimônio baiano" ["Bahian Patrimony's Baroque Reason"] Revista de Antropologia (Brazil), 51(1): 29-73

2007. "The Sounds of Tradition: Arbitrariness and Agency in a Brazilian Cultural Heritage Center." Ethnos 72(3):383-407

2007. "Recent Approaches in English to Brazilian Racial Ideologies: Ambiguity, Research Methods, and Semiotic Ideologies." Comparative Studies in Society and History, 49(4): 997-1009.

2004 "'X Marks the Future of Brazil': Racial Politics, Bedeviling Mixtures and Protestant Ethics in a Brazilian Cultural Heritage Center," in Off Stage/On Display: Intimacies and Ethnographies in the Age of Public Culture. Andrew Shryock, editor, Stanford University Press, pp. 191-224.