Melissa Teixeira *16 HIS
Teacher, Scholar, Writer
Associate Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania
Melissa Teixeira is a historian of Brazil and Latin America whose work bridges political, economic and legal history. Teixeira earned her Ph.D. in history from Princeton, in addition to degrees from the University of Cambridge and the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining Penn, she was a Prize Fellow in Economics, History and Politics at Harvard University. Her first book, “A Third Path: Corporatism in Brazil and Portugal” (2024), explores how dictatorships in the 1930s responded to the Great Depression with bold economic experiments whose legacies continue to shape the present. She is now developing a new project, “Inflation and the Making of Brazilian Democracy,” which investigates how decades of economic instability — and especially inflation — shaped Brazil’s transition from military rule to democratic governance, culminating in the Real Plan of 1994.