Andre Pagliarini
Assistant Professor Louisiana State University
- Baton Rouge LA
Dr. Pagliarini's research focuses on the politics of nationalism, development, and class in modern Latin America.
Biography
Areas of Expertise
Research Focus
Latin American Nationalism & Civil–Military Dynamics
Dr. Pagliarini’s research focuses on nationalism, development, and class politics in modern Latin America, with emphasis on twentieth-century Brazil and U.S.–Latin American relations. He blends archival and diplomatic records, military and oral histories, and policy analysis to trace civil–military dynamics and historical memory across Cold War dictatorships.
Accomplishments
Fulbright Global Scholar Award
2022-2023
Latin American and Caribbean Studies Dissertation Prize
2018
Education
Brown University
Ph.D.
2018
Brown University
M.A.
2013
University of Maryland, College Park
B.A.
2012
Media Appearances
Argument | Trump’s Tariff Threat Against Brazil Might Politically Boost Lula
Foreign Policy online
2025-07-17
Earlier this year, Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, left Congress and relocated to the United States. Since then, he’s been lobbying for U.S. President Donald Trump to intervene on behalf of his father, who is on trial for attempting to overturn the 2022 Brazilian election. After months of cozying up to power players in Washington, including dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Eduardo Bolsonaro finally got what he wished for.
Opinion | The Deeper Reason That Trump Is Raging Against Brazil Right Now
New Republic online
2025-07-12
It’s not just about defending his buddy Jair Bolsonaro or protecting social-media companies from Brazilian laws. It’s much bigger than that: Trump’s grievance is global.
Opinion | What the Paiva Family Means to Brazil
The Nation online
2025-02-19
In I’m Still Here, one Brazilian clan’s confrontation with the military dictatorship dramatizes the last half-century of Brazil’s democratic travails.
The Life and Times of Lula da Silva
LA Review of Books online
2025-02-01
Andre Pagliarini considers the recent biography “Lula” by Fernando Morais, translated by Brian Mier.
Opinion | Lula and the US haven’t always gotten along. It’s time for Biden to change that
The Guardian online
2022-11-03
There is a basis for a strong connection between Lula and Biden, forged in the fire of the far-right extremism they both have faced and defeated at the polls.
Articles
Believing in (Economic) Miracles in Brazil and Chile
Radical History Review2025
Japan’s economic miracle began in the shadow of a mushroom cloud. So argued Joelmir Beting, the economy editor of one of Brazil’s leading newspapers, in July 1970. Beting was intrigued by the former Axis power’s sustained postwar economic growth. The kamikaze pilot, “who in the name of the fatherland launched himself at the sides of enemy aircraft carriers,” had been replaced by the Japanese worker, “the kamikaze of the economic system, a man who works ten hours a day, has four vacation days per year, whose retirement is only 2.9 dollars per month, merely symbolic, which leads the worker, while still young, to save a third of his salary and invest it in fixed income securities or shares, to have something to live on in his old age.”1 Such discipline and self-sacrifice, Beting suggested, was central not just to Japan’s reconstruction following the devastation of World War II but...
Recognition More Than Friendship: The Bicentennial of US-Brazil Relations, 1824–2024
Latin American Research Review2025
Marking the bicentennial of US-Brazil relations, this article assesses the fraught inception of the bilateral relationship and where it stands today. The United States, fueled by the ideals of its revolution, viewed itself in the nineteenth century as a beacon of democratic principles beset by powerful European discontents. Brazil’s position as an independent nation with deep ties to Portugal bred suspicion. The promulgation of Brazil’s 1824 Constitution offered a modicum of common ground, creating space for a political rapprochement culminating in formal recognition. The relationship thereafter was proper but distant. Brazil today is not a rival of the United States, but some worry that it has not done enough to distance itself from Washington’s antagonists. Indeed, while friendship and commonality have been common bywords of leaders in both nations, suspicion and ambivalence have been ever-present. If anything, the surprise is that both countries remain as close as they are today.
"Singers of the Miracle”: Musical Boosterism and the Marketing of Patriotic Authoritarianism in Dictatorial Brazil
The Latin Americanist2023
Over twenty-one years in power, the Brazilian military dictatorship sought to secure a degree of popular legitimacy outside of competitive electoral politics. One of the ways it did so was by cultivating a demonstrative, uncomplicated sense of patriotism. This article examines that strategy by focusing on the trajectory of Dom and Ravel, a musical duo that became synonymous with the regime’s flag-waving boosterism before fading when they no longer served official interests. I seek to understand the group as a short-lived media sensation, drawing on newspaper and magazine coverage to situate them within the broader context of the regime’s patriotic authoritarianism. The duo’s fate allows us to draw some substantive conclusions about the dictatorship’s efforts to legitimize itself through patriotic propaganda. First, I argue that artistic output explicitly backed by the regime failed to escape association with the military government. Second, that the group’s success was ultimately short-lived because the type of patriotism the regime sought to inculcate in the population held limited lasting appeal in a nation that remained woefully unequal and politically divided throughout the period of military rule.
‘Real Self-Help’ and the Seeds of Neoliberalism: Foreign Aid to Brazil from Kennedy to Johnson
The International History Review2022
Drawing from sources at the Kennedy and Johnson presidential libraries, as well as secondary literature, this article has two main goals. The first is to examine the concept of self-help employed by U.S. officials in the formulation of foreign policy in the 1960s as a discursive metric to evaluate political events in Brazil after the 1964 military coup. I argue that this innocuous-sounding policy trope enabled U.S. policymakers to understate their investment in affecting political conditions in contested areas around the world, particularly in Brazil where it sanctioned a right-wing military coup in 1964. The second, more tentative aim of this article is to situate self-help as a discursive forerunner of what would later be called neoliberalism. Emphasizing technocratic interventions, personal responsibility, and a vision of government that placed the onus for combatting poverty on apolitical individuals rather than a state democratically accountable to its citizens, the notion of self-help carried profound political implications.
Tongues of Fire: Silas Malafaia and the Historical Roots of Neo-Pentecostal Power in Bolsonaro’s Brazil
Latin American Perspectives2023
Evangelical Christians and especially Neo-Pentecostals in Brazil have gone from accepting a position as junior partners in a broad governing coalition led by the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party—PT) to asserting themselves as an indispensable pillar of the Jair Bolsonaro administration. A close examination of the career of the prominent Bolsonarist pastor Silas Malafaia suggests that if progressives want to improve their political relationship with evangelical voters they must first find discursive and material ways to neutralize or at least work around the most prominent and virulently conservative faith leaders.
Media
