Lucas Koutsoukos-ChalhoubMellon Postdoctoral Fellow

Lucas Koutsoukos-Chalhoub (PhD, University of Michigan) is a historian of Latin America specializing in the intersections of race, politics, and populism in Brazil.

His research reinterprets the life of Gregório Fortunato—President Getúlio Vargas’s chief bodyguard—to examine how personal stories relate to and inform wider political narratives. At the Fox Center, he will develop a manuscript that positions Fortunato’s life at the heart of Brazil’s racial and political imagination, engaging the life/story theme by examining how his story has been constructed, distorted, and remembered. This work will lay the foundation for his second project, on the myth of “meritocracy” as a tool to perpetuate structural racism in modern Brazil.