(updated in March, 2005)
Simon Schwartzman is the president of the
Instituto de Estudos do Trabalho e Sociedade in Rio de Janeiro. He was born
in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in a Jewish familiy. He studied
sociology, political science and public administration at the Federal
University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil (1958-1961),
attended UNESCO's Latin American School of Social Sciences (FLACSO)
in Santiago de Chile (1962-3),
and obtained his Ph. D. in political science from the University
of California, Berkeley in 1973. His first work was at the Federal University
of Minas Gerais, as assistant professor of political science and researcher. In
1964 he was forced out of his work and country by the Brazilian military regime,
and in 2000 he was reinstated to the University according to the Brazilian amnesty
legislation, retiring as associate professor.
He has lived in Rio de Janeiro since 1969, working and teaching at the Fundação
Getúlio Vargas and, until 1988, at the Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas
do Rio de Janeiro
He was a professor of political science at the Universidade
de São Paulo, and, between between 1999 and 2002, director of the American
Institutes for Research for Brazil. From May 1994 to December, 1998, was President
of Brazil's Institute of Geography and Statistics (Fundação
IBGE). Before that, he was the research director of the Research Group on
Higher Education at the Universidade de São Paulo. Short term appointments and
fellowships during these years included the Woodrow
Wilson International Center for Scholars (1978), the Tinker Professorship
of Latin American Studies at Columbia University (1986), a visiting professorship
at the School of Education and the Center for Studies on Higher Education of the
University of California, Berkeley (1985), the Institute of Advanced Studies of
the Universidade de São Paulo (1987), the Nabuco Professor of Brazilian Studies
at the Center for Latin American Studies of Stanford University (2001) and brief
periods as visiting scholar at the Swedish
Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences (1986) the St. Antonys
College (1994) and the Centre
for Brazilian Studies (2003), Oxford University. In the spring of 2004 he was the Robert
F. Kennedy Visiting Professor of Latin American Studies at Harvard Univesity,
assigned to the Department of Sociology. He is a former President of the Brazilian
Sociological Association, and was chairman of the research group on the sociology
of science and technology of the International Sociological Association. He was
for many years the editor of Dados - Revista de Ciências Sociais, and belongs
to the editorial board of several academic journals in Latin America and Europe.
His earlier work dealt with questions of political change in a
historical and comparative perspective, with special emphasis on
Brazil. More recently, he has worked with the sociological and
political dimensions of the production of knowledge, in science,
technology and education. In 1985 he was the rapporteur of a
Presidential Commission established by the Brazilian government
to reorganize the country's higher education system, and in 1993/1994
he headed a working group commissioned by the Brazilian Ministry
of Science and Technology and the World Bank to prepare a policy
paper for Brazil's science and technology sector. The conclusions
of this work are published in a three volume series by the Fundação
Getúlio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro, and available on this site.
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