Brazil Center
Staff
Jennifer Potter-Andreu, Coordinator (2001-present)
Ms. Jennifer Potter-Andreu coordinates four student exchanges under the U.S.-Brazil Higher Education Consortia Program, organizes activities including Amazon Week, the Conference of Texas Brazilianists, Brazilian Film Series, and Portuguese Workshops, and is responsible for center publications. She has a B.A. in geography from Macalester College and completed coursework toward an M.A. in geography at the University of Connecticut. She previously worked as a community organizer in Minnesota and Brazil.
Previous Directors
Chandler Stolp, Director (2005-2007)
Dr. Stolp is an Associate Professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs of the University of Texas at Austin. At the LBJ School, he is Director of the Inter-American Policy Studies Program and the Ph.D. Program. Dr. Stolp is also a Faculty Research Associate at the Population Research Center and an Endowed Research Fellow at the IC2 Institute.
Dr. Stolp is an applied statistician and economist whose research focuses on policy decisionmaking, regional development, and social policy evaluation, especially as they relate to Latin America and to U.S-Latin American relations. He completed his undergraduate work at Stanford University in economics and engineering, worked for a period as a consulting statistician at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and later earned his doctorate in decision sciences and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Stolp is the author or coauthor of scores of scholarly publications and has worked as a statistical and economics consultant for numerous public and private agencies in Texas and throughout Latin America. With an abiding interest in the application of innovative statistical techniques to "messy" data environments, Dr. Stolp focuses his current research on the evaluation of health and education programs in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America.
Joseph D. Straubhaar (2002-2005)
Dr. Straubhaar is the Amon G. Carter Centennial Professor of Communications in the Department of Radio-TV-Film and Associate Director for International Programs of the Telecommunication and Information Policy Institute at the University of Texas.
His primary teaching, research and writing interests are in international communication and cultural theory, information societies and the digital divide in the U. S. and other countries, and global television production and flow. His graduate teaching ranges from courses in globalization and hybridization theory, comparative media systems, international telecommunications systems, and Latin American media to research methods. His undergraduate teaching covers the same range plus introduction to mass communication and the information society. He does research in Brazil and other Latin America countries, as well as in Asia and Africa, and has taken student groups to Latin America and Asia. Dr. Straubhaar has conducted seminars abroad on media research, television programming strategies, and telecommunications privatization. He is on the editorial board of the Howard Journal of Communication, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, and Revista INTERCOM.
Robert H. Wilson (1999-2002)
Dr. Wilson is the Mike Hogg Professor in Urban Policy in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He teaches in the areas of local and state economic development policy, urban policy, and econometrics. His research activities are in the areas of local and state development strategies, community participation in state and local policymaking, telecommunications/technology and regional development, and public policy in Brazil.
Dr. Wilson was Assistant Dean at the LBJ School from 1980 through 1983, served as the Coordinator of the Ph.D. Program in Public Policy (1991-1994), as Director of the Urban Issues Program (1995-2003), and Director of the Brazil Center (2000-2002), and currently is Deputy Director, of the Policy Research Institute and Director of LLILAS's Center for Latin American Social Policy. Wilson also has served as a principal researcher on projects and grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Ford Foundation, National Science Foundation, Congressional Research Service, Fund for Innovation in Post-Secondary Education, Fulbright Commission, and more.
In recognition of a career dedicated to examining Brazil, and for his work as Director of the Brazil Center, Wilson was inducted into the National Order of the Southern Cross by decree of the President of Brazil in April 2003.
Lawrence Graham (1995-1999)
Dr. Graham is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. He founded the Brazil Center in 1995 with the support of LLILAS Director Peter Cleaves. Under his leadership, the Brazil Center negotiated Leitorado funding to promote Brazil in the exterio from the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as a landmark agreement between the Brazilian Ministry of Education and the Univeristy of Texas, greatly facilitating collaboration between UT and various Brazilian universities.
Dr. Graham's fields of specialization are development policy and comparative politics, with regional concentrations in Latin America (his primary area of interest) and southern Europe. A recipient of various external grants and awards (e.g., Fulbright, National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, International Research and Exchanges Board, and Ford), he has conducted fieldwork on a regular basis in Latin America and southern Europe over the past thirty-five years. His publications have focused on bureaucratic politics and public policy in developing areas such as Brazil and Portugal. Representative of his scholarship are The State and Policy Outcomes in Latin America (1990), The Political Economy of Brazil (1990), and The Portuguese Military and the State (1993). He received a B.A. from Duke, an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin, and a Ph.D. from the University of Florida. Before retiring from the university in December 2003, Dr. Graham served as Vice President for International Programs.