Leslie Bethell

Who is Leslie Bethell?

Leslie Michael Bethell is an English historian, university professor, and Brazilianist who specialises in the study of 19th and 20th Century Latin America, focusing on Brazil in particular. He received both his Bachelor of Arts and Doctorate in History at the University of London. Bethell has served as Visiting Professor at the University Research Institute of Rio de Janeiro at the Universidade Cândido Mendes, the University of California, San Diego, and at the University of Chicago. He has been associated with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, most recently being appointed Senior Scholar of their Brazil Institute, since 1987. He was the founding director of the Centre for Brazilian Studies at the University of Oxford, serving in that capacity from 1998 to 2007. He has also held lengthy academic posts at St Antony's College and at his alma mater, the University of London.

He is the sole editor of the eleven volume Cambridge History of Latin America, a massive attempt at compiling and integrating the existing scholarship of Latin American studies. The entire project took more than fifteen years to be completed. The work was praised widely, with the historian Paul Gootenberg noting that the series had "earned rave scholarly reviews throughout the 1990s". The Library Journal referred to the first two volumes of the series as "the most detailed, comprehensive, and authoritative work on the subject available", while the political scientist Paul W. Drake called various volumes in the set "landmark[s] in their field." Reviews were not completely positive, however, with some of the volumes being described as "unwieldy" and skewed too much to the present age. Alternately, the series has also been criticised for its lack of coverage of issues whose impacts have extended into contemporary times and of the trends that had been emerging in Latin America around the time of its various publication dates.