Croft Associate Professor of History and International Studies
Office Hours: By Appointment
Croft 315
(662) 915-1500 | dinius@olemiss.edu
Education
Ph.D, Harvard University
Teaching and Research Interests
Modern Latin America
Oliver Dinius is the Executive Director of the Croft Institute for International Studies and an Associate Professor of History and International Studies. A native of Germany, he received the equivalent of a B.A. from the Ruprecht-Karls Universität Heidelberg before moving to the United States to pursue doctoral work in Latin American history at Harvard University. Dr. Dinius studies the social and economic development of modern Latin America, 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 University Press, 2011), is a history of the country’s foremost state-owned enterprise, the Companhia Siderúrgica 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 two projects under the umbrella theme of development and inequality in contemporary Brazil. a monograph on the history of regional development initiatives for the Amazon region and a series of essays on the impact of Brazil’s labor justice system on class relations. The underlying goal is to understand how regional and class inequalities shaped (and often undermined) the state’s ambitious social and economic development policies.
Dinius offers lecture classes, upper-division seminars, and graduate courses on Brazil and modern Latin America through the history department. For the Croft Institute, Dinius has regularly taught the Introduction to International Studies (Inst 101), the core course on Latin America (Inst 207), and upper-division courses on “The War on Drugs in Latin America,” “The Problem of Inequality in Latin America,” and “Soccer Madness: From Brazil to the World.” He advises Croft senior theses on a wide range of Latin American topics.
