This is a special Seminar Series hosted by the Brazilian Studies Programme.

Tim Power is a comparative political scientist with a deep commitment to interdisciplinary area studies. Currently Head of the Social Sciences Division, Tim arrived in Oxford in 2005 to take up a joint appointment in Area Studies and the Department of Politics. From 2008 to 2012 he directed the Latin American Centre, and he became Head of the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA) in 2018. Tim’s research concerns democratization and political institutions (parties, legislatures, and elections) in modern Latin America, especially Brazil. With Cesar Zucco (Fundacao Getulio Vargas), and also co-directs the Brazilian Legislative Surveys, which have recorded the opinions of Brazilian politicians in every parliament elected since 1990. Tim has been working with several colleagues on the challenges of coalition government in presidential systems.

Andreza de Souza Santos is Associate Professor and Director of the Brazil Institute at King’s College London. She is a leading political anthropologist whose research bridges urban studies, political economy, and development. She completed her PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews and holds a master’s degree in Social Sciences jointly awarded by the Universities of Freiburg, Jawaharlal Nehru (Delhi), and KwaZulu-Natal (Durban). Before joining King’s College London, she was Director of the Brazilian Studies Programme at the University of Oxford, where she also served as Lecturer and Postdoctoral Researcher in the ESRC Urban Transformations portfolio.

She has authored The Politics of Memory: Urban Cultural Heritage in Brazil and several edited volumes on subnational governance and urban transformation. Her research has appeared in leading journals such as The Lancet, Nature Human Behaviour, and Scientific Data. Andreza is also a Trustee of the IJURR Foundation.

Malu Gatto is Associate Professor of Latin American Politics at the Institute of the Americas at University College London (UCL), where she also serves as Deputy Head of Department and Vice-Dean for Advancement & Alumni for the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences. Her work explores questions about political behaviour, representation, policymaking, and gender and politics with a regional focus on Latin America, especially Brazil, and has been published in various outlets, including Comparative Political Studies, the British Journal of Political Science, Party Politics and Politics & Gender. She is the author of Resistance to Gender Quotas in Latin America, published in 2025 by Oxford University Press. She has a DPhil from the University of Oxford and has previously been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich, a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars.

Saul Tourinho Leal is a preeminent Brazilian constitutional lawyer, who has also advised the Constitutional Court of South Africa and the Supreme Court of Israel. He holds a PhD in Constitutional Law from The Humboldt University of Berlin.