I am Frederico Freitas, a scholar of digital, environmental, urban, and Latin American history.

Since 2016, I have been part of the Department of History at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where I am an associate professor of digital and Latin American history.

My current book project, titled Concrete Tropics: An Environmental History of Brazil’s Modernist Capital, is an environmental history of Brasília, the modernist capital city built by Brazil in the 1950s. The book covers a century of history of the city, from the initial mapping of a planned inland capital in the 1890s through its construction in the 1950s and continuing to the 1990s. As a modernist city designed upon utopian ideals, Brasília was to provide a novel urban environment to foster the birth of a modern society. And yet, the city had to contend with the reality of the nature supporting its existence. Concrete Tropics shows how Brasília and the society it created are the product of not only the successes and failures of modernist planning but also the environmental processes that shaped the city’s construction.

My first book, Nationalizing Nature: Iguazu Falls and National Parks at the Brazil-Argentina Border, focuses on the environmental history of the border between Brazil and Argentina in the twentieth century and the creation of the two national parks of Iguaçu (in Brazil) and Iguazú (in Argentina) in the 1930s. The book was produced with the generous support of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. The book was the winner of the Warren Dean Memorial Prize (Conference on Latin American History) as the most significant work on the history of Brazil, received an honorable mention in the Bryce Wood Book Award (Latin American Studies Association) as an outstanding book on Latin America in the social sciences and humanities published in English, and an honorable mention in the Sérgio Buarque de Holanda Prize (Latin American Studies Association’s Brazil Section) for the best book in the social sciences on Brazil.

I have also co-edited two books with Jacob Blanc, Big Water: The Making of the Borderlands Between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, (University of Arizona Press, 2018), and The Interior: Recentering Brazilian History, (The University of Texas Press, 2024).

You can reach me at freitas.history@gmail.com

I am also on:

• Bluesky
• Linkedin
• Google scholar
• ORCID
• Lattes (Portuguese)