Celso Castro

Celso Castro is the Dean of Fundação Getulio Vargas’s School of Social Sciences/FGV CPDOC (Brazil). He received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the National Museum/UFRJ, Brazil (1995) and was a visiting scholar at the University of Florida, the University of Oxford and El Colegio de México. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Freedom of Information Archive (FOIArchive) project, based at Columbia University (2019-2020), and was a member of the Executive Committee of the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA).

Castro has written extensively on the military in Brazilian history and society. His books include: O espírito militar (1990, 2nd ed. 2004), Os militares e a República (1995), A invenção do Exército brasileiro (2002), Antropologia dos militares (2009; co-authored with Piero Leirner), Exército e nação: estudos sobre a história do Exército brasileiro (2012); Qualitative Methods in Military Studies (2013; co-edited with Helena Carreiras), Researching the Military (2016; co-edited with Helena Carreiras and Sabina Frederic) and A Família Militar no Brasil (2018). He also organized a series of eight books about the military in post-1964 Brazilian history including the trilogy: Visões do golpe (1994), Os anos de chumbo (1994) and A volta aos quartéis (1995), published by the ed. Relume-Dumará, together with Gláucio Soares and Maria Celina D'Araujo; and Ernesto Geisel (1997) and Militares e política na Nova República (2000), together with Maria Celina D'Araujo.

Professor Castro’s recent research has also focused on cultural theory and the study of tourism from a social science perspective. He has organized a series of books on the topic. Castro also teaches graduate and undergraduate courses at FGV and directs a book series on the social sciences by Zahar Editors.