Bio:
Thamyris Almeida is a Visiting Assistant Professor and Postdoctoral Fellow in the Latin American and Latino Studies Program. She received her Ph.D. in Latin American and Caribbean History from Brown University in 2022. Almeida’s research and teaching focus on Latin America history with an emphasis on popular culture, media, and the Cold War.

Her book manuscript, Soul of a Modern Nation: Television in Cold War Brazil, combines historical analysis with cultural readings of texts and narratives to reframe television as part of a larger project of national transformation. Almeida emphasizes how TV programs and the cultural discourses they generated constitute an ideal prism through which to explore the interplay of morality and cultural politics against the backdrop of Cold War authoritarianism. Tracing the development of the medium in Brazil, this work highlights the hemispheric dimensions of Cold War-era discourses on development, technology and morality, and their impact on Brazilian television. Almeida’s research has been funded by the Tinker Foundation and a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship. She also received an honorable mention for the Ford Foundation Dissertation Completion Fellowship.

Prior to Swarthmore, Almeida worked as a Lecturer in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College (2022-2023) where she taught survey courses on Latin American Studies and New Latin American Cinema, as well as thematic classes on Brazilian Film and Latinx history through a televisual lens. She also served as a Marilyn Yarbrough Dissertation Fellow and Instructor in History at Kenyon College (2021-2022) and as a Brown/Wheaton Faculty Fellow in History at Wheaton College (2020-2021).

Publications:
“Television for Social Change: Transnational Networks and Educational TV in Cold War Brazil,” Journal of Cold War Studies. (Forthcoming)

Education:

• Ph.D., Brown University 
• M.A., Brown University
• M.A., University of Massachusetts Amherst
• B.A., University of Massachusetts Amherst