Niepytalska, Marta, “Stephen Bell on the Transformation of Land Use in Brazil.” Carson Fellow Portraits. Directed by Alec Hahn. Filmed August 2011. MPEG video, 3:21. https://youtu.be/XuW_ITiq9lo.
Stephen Bell is a historical geographer mainly concerned with the transformation of the Americas, especially Brazil, since approximately 1800. Following undergraduate studies at the School of Geography at Oxford University, his graduate and postgraduate work took him to the Universities of Toronto and McGill. Since 1999 he has taught at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he is currently an associate professor of geography and history for the Department of Geography. He is also an active contributor within UCLA’s Latin American Institute. Bell’s current, major project examines the historical geography of Brazil between 1850 and 1950. During his fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center, Bell focused on writing two articles on the intellectual heritage of the German geographer Leo Waibel (1888–1951) and his field work for the federal government of Brazil during the years 1946–50. His first article reviews the steps that brought this German scholar from Bonn to fieldwork in Brazil. The second article reassesses the results from his findings in the period 1946–50, partly in the light of subsequent Brazilian development patterns. Bell also gave a talk on Waibel at the Geographical Institute in Bonn, the institution this German scholar directed before 1937. Immediately following his fellowship, Bell completed his German archival research on Waibel within the Geographical Institute of the University of Tuebingen.
This Carson Fellow Portrait is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Germany License.
