Ohio State University

Faculty Member, University Libraries

Professor and Head, Latin America Collection

University Libraries; Adjunct Prof., Spanish & Portuguese Dept., History Dept.

About

NARRATIVE SUMMARY OF CAREER

Edward Anthony "Ted" Riedinger is a tenured full professor and the head of the Latin America, Hispanic, Spanish, and Portuguese Library Collection (LAT) at Ohio State University (OSU), Columbus.  He is an adjunct professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Department of History (graduate faculty) at OSU and has been an adjunct professor in the Center for Latin American Studies at Ohio University (OU), Athens.  During the academic year 2006-2007 he was a Visiting Research Associate at the Centre for Brazilian Studies and a Senior Associate Member of St. Antony’s College at the University of Oxford. 

A specialist on Brazil, Prof. Riedinger lived in that country, primarily Rio de Janeiro, from 1971 to 1988.  He was a faculty member at universities there (Pontifícia Universidade Católica -- PUC, Pontifical Catholic University; Gama Filho University), and in Mexico (Universidad de las Américas -- UDLA, University of the Americas, Puebla) and the United States (San Francisco State University -- SFSU).  He is conversant in Portuguese, Spanish, and French. 

From 1979 to 1988 he was the Educational Advising Officer of the Fulbright Commission of Brazil at the American Consulate-General in Rio de Janeiro.  There he developed a national network, in thirteen cities, of educational advising information centers and libraries serving those who wished to study or do research in the US.  His innovations for these operations included the distribution of basic collections that included reference materials and audio-visual and computer resources, and the establishment of national conferences and standardized training workshops.  In support of this work, he traveled the whole of Brazil on numerous occasions. 

In 1984 he organized a regional association of advisers, the Working Group of US Overseas Educational Advisers in South America.  He then aided in the formation (1985) of a worldwide organization of advisers, the Overseas Educational Advisers Group (OSEAS) within the National Association for Foreign Student Affairs (NAFSA), becoming its first representative for Latin America.  He has lectured, given workshops, and done consulting on educational advising throughout Latin America and Europe.  He wrote Where in the World to Learn (1995), the first guide to applying information management to advising; and Turned-on Advising (1995), one of the earliest compendiums of computer and video resources for advising. 

He was a member of the executive organizing committee of the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA, secretariat at Vanderbilt University).  Its first secretary (1994-1996), editor of the conference Proceedings, and a member of the executive board.  In addition, he served on the planning committee for the annual conferences held in Atlanta, Georgia (1994); at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis (1995); King's College, Cambridge University, England (1996); in Washington, DC (1997); and Recife, Brazil (2000).  His research and publishing interests include twentieth-century Brazilian politics; high modernism (a "renaissance in the tropics"); and the role of Brazil in world history as an Afro-Mediterranean synthesis in the southern Atlantic.

On the eve of the first direct civilian presidential election (1988) in Brazil since the military coup of 1964, he published Como se faz um presidente:  A campanha do JK  (The Making of a President, Brazil, 1955: The Campaign of Juscelino Kubitschek).  The first scholarly study of a Brazilian presidential election, it described the campaign of Juscelino Kubitschek, the founder of Brasília.  He served as President Kubitschek’s private secretary for English correspondence from 1972 to 1976.  He has published scholarly material on Brazil and Latin America for numerous national and international reference works, several award-winning.  He contributed to Envisioning Brazil; A Guide to Brazilian Studies in the United States, 1945-2000, which was co-winner of the 2006 Roberto Reis Book Award of BRASA.  Prof. Riedinger has written for the popular Brazilian media including the newsweekly, Veja, and the national dailies, the Jornal do Brasil and O Estado de São Paulo.  Prof. Riedinger has authored or edited approximately 350 articles, reviews, chapters, and books, in English and Portuguese.

He has designed and manages a number of web sites related to Brazilian history and research.  He serves as a member of the editorial advisory board for the journals, História, ciências, saúde--Manguinhos, of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Rio de Janeiro), and The Maya Studies Journal=La Revista de Estudios Mayas at OSU.  He is a regular reviewer for Choice, Library Journal, and the Multicultural Review.  In addition, he has reviewed for the European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Hispanic American Historical Review (HAHR), the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies [of Australasia], the Journal of Latin American Studies, and the Times Literary Supplement (London).  He also reviews monograph manuscripts on Brazil for university publishers.

Prof. Riedinger is a consultant for projects requiring expertise on Brazil.  He advised the Ohio trade mission to South America led by former Governor George Voinovich in 1998 and has been a consultant on Brazilian subjects for Misher Films (Sony-Universal Studios).  Furthermore, he was one of a group of scholars who advised the Brazilian Embassy regarding the state of Brazilian studies in the US.  He also has been an evaluator of grant applications for the Fulbright Senior Scholar Program of the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars (CIES), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the international education programs of the US Department of Education.

He received MA and PhD degrees in history from the University of Chicago (1969, 1978), and has a masters in library and information science from the University of California, Berkeley (1989).  A student at Chicago of William H. McNeill, he compiled (2002) a bibliography of McNeill's Rise of the West.  Dr. Riedinger pursued postgraduate work in history at Harvard (1969), Oxford (Exeter College, 1970), and Cambridge (Selwyn College, 1986) universities.  His secondary and undergraduate education occurred primarily at Catholic seminaries in Indiana. 

He has been a recipient of numerous awards from Brazilian and US government and private agencies, including the American Embassy in Brazil, the Escola Superior de Guerra (ESG -- Brazilian War College), and the US Information Agency (USIA).  He has been a Ford Foundation Fellow, Mendel Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar, and a grantee of the NEH, the Tinker Foundation, and the US embassies in Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela.  He was on the Fulbright Senior Specialist roster for 2001-2006.  In 2005 he received the Tiefel Achievement Award in Teaching of OSU Libraries (OSUL).  During the course of his career, Dr. Riedinger has received grants, equivalent in current value, to over $250,000. 

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