Marc Adam Hertzman completed his Ph.D. in Latin American history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in May, 2008. His dissertation, “Surveillance and Difference: The Making of Samba, Race, and Nation in Brazil, 1880s-1970s,” was recently awarded the 2009 Best Dissertation Prize by the New England Council of Latin American Studies (NECLAS). The dissertation and forthcoming book trace the creation and rise of samba music in Brazil from the end of slavery to the installation and consolidation of a military dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s.
Researched in over twenty archives, the project shows how surveillance and social difference were institutionalized in post-Abolition Brazil through a wide range of legal and discursive projects and processes. Those projects and processes began formally with state sponsored anti-vagrancy campaigns, unleashed in the wake of Abolition (1888), and culminated in the 1930s and 1940s with the creation of musician-centered organizations dedicated to defending their members’ intellectual property rights. During the 1960s and 1970s, the military and its opponents helped consolidate and solidify narratives and relationships which had developed over the previous decades. The full dissertation abstract is available here.
In Madison he won two teaching awards, and his teaching experience ranges across Brazil, Spanish America, the Caribbean, and the African Diaspora. Last Fall at Wesleyan he taught an upper-level seminar on “The History of ‘Black Music’ in the Americas and Beyond” and in the Spring teamed up with Professor Claire Potter for “Colonialism and Its Consequences in the Americas.” This semester he is giving a seminar on race, class, and sexuality in Brazilian history.
Before moving to Middletown, he lived in Madison, and before that in Rio de Janeiro; Santiago, Chile; St. Louis; and northern New Mexico, where he was born and raised. In college, he majored in History and Spanish Language & Literature. His master’s thesis, “Searching for Here: Nation and Race, Time and Space in Bluefields, Nicaragua (1914-1928),” examines the strategic identity shifts employed by Afro-Creoles in eastern Nicaragua, as they alternately appealed for political and figurative inclusion in Nicaragua, the United States, and Great Britain.
His research has been supported by Fulbright-Hays, the Doris Quinn Foundation, Tinker-Nave, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and others. In 2008 he was invited to participate in the Emerging Scholars Speaker Series at Penn. State’s Africana Research Center.