Maria Lucia G. Pallares-Burke

Maria Lúcia G. Pallares-Burke was Professor at the University of São Paulo and is now Research Associate of the Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge. She has worked on the cultural history of the European Enlightenment and its reception in Latin America, emphasizing a comparative approach to the circulation and reception of ideas. She also published two books about the Brazilian polymath and anglophile Gilberto Freyre, who is said to have discovered Brazil for the Brazilians in the 1930s: a study of his early years and, with Peter Burke, an intellectual portrait concerned with his whole lifetime. Her most recent book, O Triunfo do Fracasso (2012), is about the German friend of Freyre at Columbia University, Rüdiger Bilden, and his battle for the dissemination of the idea of Brazil as a "laboratory of civilization" and for the improvement of race relations in the USA.