Oliver Dinius

Executive Director of Croft Institute and Croft Associate Professor of History

Email:
dinius@olemiss.edu
Office Location:
304 Croft Institute
Phone:
662-915-1500
Website:
Personal Website

My primary role is to serve as the Executive Director of the Croft Institute for International Studies. This includes some teaching (Inst 101 & Senior Theses) as well as extensive administrative work.

Research Interests

My research focuses on development policies and their social impact in Brazil and Latin America more broadly. My current project applies that interest to the Amazon River, as part of a Fulbright Scholar Award in Belem.

Biography

Oliver Dinius is the Executive Director of the Croft Institute and Associate Professor of History. His research is on modern Latin America. A native of Germany, he received the equivalent of a B.A. from the Ruprecht-Karls Universitaet Heidelberg before moving to the United States to pursue doctoral work in Latin American history. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2004 and joined the faculty at the University of Mississippi the same year. Dr. Dinius's research focuses on the history of social and economic development, above all in 20th-century Brazil. His first book, "Brazil's Steel City: Developmentalism, Strategic Power, and Industrial Relations in Volta Redonda, 1941-1964" (Stanford UP, 2011), is a history of the country's foremost state-owned enterprise, the Companhia Siderurgica Nacional. He is also the co-editor of Company Towns in the Americas: Landscape, Power, and Working-Class Communities (University of Georgia Press, 2011). Currently, Dinius is working on two projects under the umbrella theme of development and inequality in postwar Brazil. The next publication will be a monograph on the history of regional development initiatives for the Amazon region. The underlying goal is to understand how regional and class inequalities shaped (and often undermined) the state's ambitious social and economic development policies. For the Croft Institute, Dinius regularly teaches the Introduction to International Studies (Inst 101). He has also regularly taught the core course on Latin America (Inst 207) and upper-division courses on "The War on Drugs in Latin America," "The Problem of Inequality in Latin America," and "Soccer Madness: From Brazil to the World." He advises Croft senior theses on a wide range of Latin American topics. Dinius also offers lecture classes, upper-division seminars, and graduate courses on Brazil and modern Latin America through the history department.

Oliver Dinius CV