Alexander Main is Director of International Policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. His areas of expertise include Latin American integration and regionalism, US security and counternarcotics policy in Central America, US development assistance to Haiti, and US relations with Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Honduras and Venezuela. Prior to CEPR, Alex spent more than six years in South America working as a foreign policy analyst and an international cooperation consultant. He holds degrees in History and Political Science from the Sorbonne University in Paris, France.

Amy Chazkel is Associate Professor of History and holds the Bernard Hirschhorn chair of Urban Studies at Columbia University. A specialist in modern Brazil, her research and teaching focus on urban and legal history, the history of crime and policing and slavery and post-abolition societies. She is the author of Laws of Chance: Brazil’s Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Modern Public Life in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2011) and co-editor of The Rio de Janeiro Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University Press, 2016).  She is completing Rio de Janeiro and the Politics of Nightfall (forthcoming with Oxford University Press), a book about the history of the urban nighttime from the perspective of nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. She serves on the Radical History Review Editorial Collective. In addition to her published scholarship, she also co-directs the Columbia University Seminar on the Public Humanities and the working group, “Refugee Cities: Urban Dimensions of Forced Displacement,” sponsored by the Columbia Center for the Study of Social Difference, which launched in the fall of 2022. 

Andrew Miller brings two decades of human rights activism and international field experience to his work as Amazon Watch's DC Advocacy Director. Since 2007, he has collaborated closely with indigenous partners from Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, facilitating rights-based advocacy at Washington DC institutions such as multilateral banks, U.S. executive offices, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. He travels regularly to the Amazon region and offers frequent commentary to media such Al Jazeera English, CNN en Español, and the BBC World Service. Previously, he held several positions at Amnesty International USA and served as an "unarmed bodyguard" in Colombia with Peace Brigades International.

Erika Robb Larkins is Professor of Anthropology, Behner Stiefel Chair of Brazilian Studies, and Director of the Center for Brazilian Studies at California State University, San Diego (SDSU).  She is the author of two books: The Spectacular Favela: Violence in Modern Brazil (University of California Press, 2015) and The Sensation of Security: Private Guards and Social Order in Brazil  (Cornell University Press, 2023). She has also published widely on issues of race, gender, and politics in Brazil, with recent articles appearing in American Ethnologist, City and Society, and the Journal for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. Larkins is currently working on a new National Science Foundation-funded research project on the intersection of extreme heat, environmental racism, and inequality in Rio de Janeiro. She is also the President of the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA).

Ben Cowan is Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego and a specialist in right-wing radicalism, morality and sexuality in Cold War Brazil, with a specialization in the cultural and gender history of the post-1964 era. His publications include: Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil (UNC, 2016) and Moral Majorities across the Americas: Brazil, the United States, and the Creation of the Religious Right (UNC, 2021) and articles in American Quarterly, The Journal of the History of Sexuality, The Hispanic American Historical Review, Radical History Review, and Latin American Research Review.

Keisha-Khan Y. Perry is the Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on race, gender and politics in the Americas, urban geography and questions of citizenship, Black women’s intellectual histories, and the interrelationship between scholarship, pedagogy and political engagement. Her first book, Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil, won the 2014 National Women’s Studies Association Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize and an updated and revised Portuguese translation was published in September 2022 by the Federal University of Bahia Press. The book includes an analysis of the relationship between environmental justice movements and land and housing rights struggles in Brazil. She published the edited volume Black Women in Latin America and the Caribbean: Critical Perspectives and Research with Melanie Medeiros (Rutgers University Press, 2023). She is currently working on two book projects: Evictions and Convictions: The Right to Home and life in the Americas, a comparative analysis of grassroots movements for the right to housing and life in Jamaica, the United States, and Brazil, and The Fire Inside: The Social Justice Imperative at the Heart of African Diaspora Studies that illustrates the challenges of activist research amidst racial and gender violence.

Kendall Thomas is the Nash Professor of Law at Columbia University Law School and the co-founder and director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture, where he leads interdisciplinary projects and programs that explore how the law operates as one of the central ways to create meaning in society. A scholar of comparative constitutional law and human rights, his teaching and research focus on critical race theory, legal philosophy, feminist legal theory, and law and sexuality. His seminal writing on the intersection of race and law appears in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Founded the Movement (1996), which he co-edited.

Sidney Chalhoub is David and Peggy Rockefeller Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is also affiliated with the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Before moving to Harvard, he taught at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) for thirty years. His research and teaching focus mainly on the social history of Brazil in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, having written books on working-class culture, urban slavery, public health, and the literature and the political and social ideas of Machado de Assis.

Stanley A. Gacek is Senior Advisor for Global Strategies at the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW). He was ILO Deputy and Interim Director for Brazil from 2011 to 2016. He worked with the AFL-CIO as Assistant Director, Responsible for the Americas, Associate Director for International Relations, and Special Counsel for International Labor Law from 1997 to 2010. He served as Assistant Director for International Affairs and Assistant General Counsel for the UFCW from 1979 to 1997. He received the Order of Merit from the Brazilian Superior Labor Court in 2016 and earned a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1978.