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Melissa Teixeira is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. A historian of modern Brazil and Latin America, her work examines how economic crises reshape political systems and popular expectations of the state. Her first book, A Third Path: Corporatism in Brazil and Portugal (Princeton University Press, 2024), offers a transnational history of how the Great Depression unleashed state-led experiments to regulate the economy across the Lusophone world. 

Our next session with Professor Melissa Teixeira explores Brazil’s efforts to tame runaway inflation during its democratic transition. She focuses on the Plano Cruzado, a heterodox stabilization program that froze prices and wages in 1986, and asks how debates about what drove inflation became a wager on how Brazilians would adjust their behavior under new economic rules. As the plan unraveled, shortages, hoarding, and speculation became routine. This presentation considers the economic and political consequences of this policy failure, and what it reveals about changing expectations of the state as a legitimate economic actor. 

Zoom Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81897629610

We look forward to seeing you!