After 37 years, Jeffrey D. Needell has retired as professor of history. Professor Needell arrived at UF after finishing his graduate work in Latin American, African, and European Cultural History at Yale and Stanford University and teaching for three years at the University of Oregon. During his time at UF, he published four books and thirty-three book chapters and refereed journal articles on politics, culture, ideology, society, and slavery in 19th- and early 20th-century Brazil. His research has been published in English, Portuguese, Spanish, and German. His first book, A Tropical Belle Epoque: Elite Society and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Rio de Janeiro (Cambridge University Press, 1987), has been published in Britain, Brazil, and Argentina, and remains in print as a paperback. His next book, The Party of Order: The Conservatives, the State, and Slavery in the Brazilian Monarchy, 1831-1871 (Stanford University Press, 2006), won two of the most coveted prizes in the Latin American history field, the Warren Dean Memorial Prize from the Conference for Latin American History and the Roberto Reis Book Award from the Brazilian Studies Association. After co-organizing and then chairing an international meeting on present-day Brazil in 2013 for the UF Center for Latin American Studies’ annual conference, he edited the book derived from it — Emergent Brazil: Key Perspectives on a New Global Power (University Press of Florida, 2015). His most recent book, The Sacred Cause: The Abolitionist Movement, Afro-Brazilian Mobilization, and Imperial Politics in Rio de Janeiro (Stanford University Press, 2020), won honorable mention in the Warren Dean Memorial Prize in 2021.
Professor Needell has been a devoted mentor to students, winning the department’s undergraduate teaching award twice. He was equally committed to the department’s graduate program. He won the graduate teaching award once, supervised five doctoral dissertations, served on twenty-two doctoral committees and was the department’s graduate coordinator in 2004-06.
In addition to his many university-level awards, Professor Needell’s post-doctoral Brazilian research was supported by three Fulbright-Hays awards, three American Philosophical Society awards, two National Endowment for the Humanities awards, and one award from the Social Science Research Council. Based on his long career of service and scholarly accomplishments, the department’s faculty unanimously voted to award him emeritus status. Professor Needell continues his research and writing from home after retirement.