Wilson Center Experts

Leslie Bethell is Emeritus Professor of Latin American History and Honorary Research Fellow, Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London; Emeritus Fellow,  St Antony's College, Oxford;  Senior Research Associate, Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil, Fundação Getulio Vargas, Rio de Janeiro; Senior Scholar, Woodrow Wilson International Center  for Scholars, Washington, D.C;  and Visiting Professor, Brazil Institute, King’s College, University of London.

He is a former Director of the Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London (1987-92) and founding Director of the Centre for Brazilian Studies, University of Oxford (1997-2007).

He has been Visiting Professor at a number of Brazilian and US universities and research institutions, including the Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro (1979), the University of California, San Diego (1986) and the University of Chicago (1992-3). At the Wilson Center in Washington he has been a Fellow (1987), Guest Scholar (1996-7) and Public Policy Scholar (2008-9, 2010 and 2011).

Professor Bethell's research has been principally in the field of nineteenth and twentieth-century Latin American – and especially Brazilian – political, social and cultural history.

Professor Bethell has been awarded the Ordem Nacional do Cruzeiro do Sul by the Brazilian government (Comendador in 1994, Grande Oficial in 1998). In 2004 he was elected a member of the Academia Brasileira de Ciências. In 2010 he was elected a sócio correspondente (one of twenty foreign members, the first English member elected since 1898) of the Academia Brasileira de Letras. He also in 2010 was awarded  the Ordem Nacional do Merito Cientifico (Comendador) by the president of Brazil.

In November 2011 he became the first holder of the Cátedra de História da América Latina in the Universidade Federal da Integração Latino-Americana, recently established in Foz de Iguacú, Brazil.