Oliver Dinius

Croft Associate Professor of History

Email:
dinius@olemiss.edu
Office Location:
501 Fraternity Row
Phone:
662-915-7148
Website:
Personal Website

My current role is to teach classes for the Croft Institute for International Studies and for the Department of History with an overarching focus on Latin America and specifically Brazil. From 2016-25, I served as the Executive Director of the Croft Institute for International Studies.

Research Interests

My current research focuses on the environmental/ecological history of the Brazilian Amazon, and more broadly on development policies and their social impact in Brazil and Latin America. My goal is to structure the book I am working on as truly interdisciplinary, with sections using conventional historical sources and others (especially covering the 21^st century) drawing on other disciplines and current journalistic material. The inspiration for this modified structure for the book came during two stays as Fulbright Scholar in Belem in 2023-24.

Biography

Oliver Dinius is a Croft Associate Professor of History & International Studies. His research focuses 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 a monograph on the history of regional development initiatives in Brazil’s Amazon region over the last eighty years. The project is interdisciplinary and brings together ecological questions with the history of economic, political, and social dimensions of development, enabling a critical reflection of the development paradigm -- a term so central to Brazil’s national narrative.

For the Croft Institute, Dinius has taught a series of the international studies major’s core classes (Inst 101, Inst 207, Inst 421/422), and he has very regularly served as senior thesis mentor on Latin American topics. He has also taught upper-division courses for Croft on "The War on Drugs in Latin America," "The Problem of Inequality in Latin America," and "Soccer Madness: From Brazil to the World." Dinius also offers lecture classes, upper-division seminars, and graduate courses on Brazil and modern Latin America through the history department. His recent signature class has been Hst 368, “Latin America and the Cold War.”

Oliver Dinius CV