Thomas Jordan
Associate Professor and Coordinator for Policy, Communication and Issues of Concern
Latin America
Office Phone: 618-650-2414
Location: Peck Hall Room 1232 and the Office of the Provost (Rendleman Hall Room 3102)
E-mail: thjorda@siue.edu
Education
Ph. D. University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) (2000 - History)
Dissertation: "Contesting the Terms of Incorporation: Labor and the State in Rio de Janeiro,
1930-1964." Thesis directed by Dr. Joseph Love, Dr. Nils Jacobsen, and Dr. James Barrett.
M.A. University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) (1993 - History)
B.A. Trinity University (San Antonio, Texas), (1989 - Economics)
Academic Appointments
Assistant Professor at Southern Illinois University (Edwardsville, IL), August 2000 to present.
Assistant Professor at Blackburn College (Carlinville, IL), 1999-2000.
Course Offerings
IS 326 Modern Latin America (team-taught interdisciplinary course on Latin America)
Hist 112A World History to 1500
Hist 112B World History since 1500
Hist 360A History of Latin America - Colonial Period
Hist 360B History of Latin America - 19th and 20th Centuries
Hist 400 Topics: History of Brazil
Hist 400 Topics: History of Cuba
Hist 460 History of Mexico
When appropriate, I am willing to offer directed-reading courses for graduate students and direct senior or independent projects for advanced undergraduate students.
Research Interests
Broadly speaking, I am interested in twentieth-century Brazilian social history. My current research examines the role that urban labor played in local, regional, and national-level politics during the 1940 to 1964 period. Focusing on urban workers and their unions in the city of Rio de Janeiro, my
work traces the twenty-year transformation of Brazil's labor movement from a relatively weak and unorganized movement in the late 1940s into a major political force by the early 1960s. In this process, the city's labor unions challenged the government's restrictions on "legitimate" union activities by fortifying the government-sanctioned unions, creating new types of labor organizations, and forging alliances with local and national politicians. My recently completed dissertation, entitled "Contesting the Terms of Incorporation: Labor and the State in Rio de Janeiro, 1930-1964," looked at these issues by focusing on the activities of the textile and metalworkers'
unions in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Currently, I am broadening my study to look at the tactics used by other labor unions to accomplish these same goals.
Selected Publications and Paper Presentations
Publications
Review of Jeffrey Lesser's Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil (2000) on H-LATAM (http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews)
Review of Anthony W. Pereira's The End of the Peasantry: The Rural Labor Movement in Northeast Brazil, 1961-1988 (1997) on H-LATAM (http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews)
Review of John D. French's The Brazilian Workers' ABC: Class Conflict and Alliances in Modern São Paulo (1992) in Thematica: Historical Research and Review, 1:1 (1994), p.123-125.
Paper Presentations
"Redefining Proper Unionism: The Case of the Metalworkers' Union in Rio de Janeiro, 1950-1964." Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association annual meeting (Louisville, Kentucky, November 2000)
"Policing the Unions: Brazil's Political Police and Workers in Rio de Janeiro, 1930-1964." Paper presented at the Social Science History Association conference (Chicago, Nov. 1998)
