Bruno Carvalho

Bruno Carvalho works on cities as lived and imagined spaces. He studies relationships between culture and urbanization, bridging history and urban studies. He often investigates how socio-cultural processes of the past converge in and with the present. He is writing a book on how people have imagined urban futures since the eighteenth century, tentatively titled The Invention of the Future: A transatlantic history of urbanization. A Rio de Janeiro native, Carvalho received his Ph.D. at Harvard University (2009) and was a faculty member at Princeton University (2009-2018). Carvalho has written numerous articles and essays. He is the author of the award-winning Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro, published in Brazil in a revised and expanded edition. His co-edited books include Occupy All Streets: Olympic Urbanism and Contested Futures (2016). He also co-edits a book series, Lateral Exchanges, on historical and contemporary issues in design and urbanization.

At Harvard, Carvalho is Co-Director of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, and a member of the Faculty Standing Committee on History and Literature, of the Advisory Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights, and of the Brazil Studies Program, as well as the Steering Committee of the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History. He is also a Faculty Affiliate in Critical Media Practice, at the Afro-Latin American Research Institute, the Center for the Environment, the Graduate School of Design, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. To learn more about Professor Carvalho and his research, read these recent interviews with the Harvard Gazette, DRCLAS, and Brazilian publications Nexo and O Globo (in Portuguese).