Ori Preuss (Ph.D. Latin American History, University of Miami, 2005), is Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of Bridging the Island: Brazilians’ Views of Spanish America and Themselves, 1865–1912 (Iberoamericana, 2011). He is also co-editor of EIAL (Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe), Tel Aviv University´s journal of Latin American Studies, and editor and translator of Latin American literature for Xargol publishing house. He has translated into Hebrew works by Ricardo Piglia, Ernesto Che Guevara, and Jorge Luis Borges, among others.

His research concentrates on nineteenth century Latin America with a special focus on Brazil. He is currently working on a book project tentatively titled “Connecting Rivers of South America: Transnational Confluences of Experience, Ideas, and Identities, 1860s-1910s.” The project addresses the ways that the circulation of men and ideas across state borders within the region contributed to the production of local knowledge and identities, focusing on practices such as diplomacy, international conferences, travel, historical writing, publishing, and translation.

Recent Publications include:

• “Um gigante cheio de bonomia: La imagen de Brasil en el discurso visual de las relaciones internacionales sudamericanas, 1902–1912,” in Sven Schuster, ed., La nación expuesta: Cultura visual y formación de la nación en América Latina (Editorial Universidad del Rosario, forthcoming in 2014).
• “Brazil into Latin America: The Demise of Slavery and Monarchy as Transnational Events,” Luso-Brazilian Review 49:1 (June 2012), pp. 96-126. Also published in Almanack 1:4 (2012).
• “Why Should Historians of Modern Latin America Take Translation Seriously?” Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, 21:1 (2010), pp. 9-17 (with Tal Goldfajn and Rosalie Sitman).

The article now published in RBPI no. 2/2013 is titled: Discovering “os ianques do sul:” Toward an Entangled Luso-Hispanic History of “Latin America”. The article sheds light on the largely forgotten role of key Brazilian intellectuals in the Latins-versus-Anglo-Saxons debates that developed around 1898, emphasizing the embeddedness of their thinking in the transnational intercrossings of men and ideas within South America. It thus challenges the common depiction of turn-of-the-century Latin Americanism as a purely Spanish American phenomenon and of the United States as its major catalyst, allowing a more nuanced understanding of this movement’s nature. More broadly, it makes a case for the importance of an entangled history of Latin American ideas and identities as a corrective to the predominantly state-centered and Eurocentric historiography.