Daniel McDonald

His book manuscript, Peripheral Citizenship: Urban Grassroots Movements and the Making of Modern Brazil, is under contract with the University of California Press. This book explores how grassroots movements in São Paulo reimagined citizenship to meet the simultaneous rise of the megacity and authoritarianism. It traces this citizenship rights project through the lives of rural migrant women as they organized to confront terrible living conditions in São Paulo's urban periphery during Brazil's military dictatorship (1964-1985) and subsequent democratic transition. Using over fifty oral histories and documents from a community digitization project, Peripheral Citizenship illuminates how migrant women constructed an expansive, participatory vision of citizenship featuring innovative forms of grassroots democracy. Research for this project was supported by a Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship and the Tinker Foundation. The manuscript builds on his dissertation, which won 2021 Best Dissertation Awards from the New England Council of Latin American Studies and the Department of History at Brown.

McDonald's scholarly work has appeared in the Journal of Urban History and is forthcoming The Americas. The former received an Honorable Mention for Best Article in the Humanities from the Latin American Studies Association Brazil Section. He has written for the public in The Washington Post and ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America. Concurrently, he has conducted extensive projects in the digital humanities. In partnership with grassroots movements in São Paulo, he directed the Grassroots Archive Digital Initiative to collect and digitize thousands of their documents to create the initial collection of a new archive, today the Centro de Memória Urbana (Urban Memory Center). Ongoing work includes an interactive historical GIS project, Mapping the Megacity, and a transnational multimedia collaborative project using Urban Intermedia methods.

At Dartmouth, McDonald teaches courses on Latin American and Brazilian history, contemporary issues, Latin American studies, and urban studies.