PhD Thesis
Title: Opening the Black Box of Financial Negotiations: the IMF, Argentina, and Brazil in the Post-war Era (1945-1964)
PhD Supervisor & 2nd Reader: Rui Esteves and Nathan Sussman
Expected completion date: 2024
The project examines the first adjustment programmes of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Argentina and Brazil in the post-war era. Based on a mixed-methods approach that combines automated and qualitative text analysis, it investigates international financial negotiations and the process of policymaking to understand why national officials of two countries followed different paths when negotiating conditionality programmes with the IMF.
Profile
Fernanda is a PhD candidate in International History and Politics and, currently, a Visiting Student Research Collaborator in the Department of History at Princeton University working with Professor Harold James. She is a research fellow at the Centre for Finance and Development, and at the University of São Paulo’s LabMundi. Fernanda holds a BA and MA degrees in International Relations from the University of São Paulo, Brazil, and has spent semesters abroad at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA-United States.
Fernanda is interested in questions related to sovereign debt, creditor-debtor relations, and financial globalisation, as well as the application of computational methods within historical research, particularly natural language processing. She has experience with Machine Learning, Classification algorithms, Topic-models, Sentiment analysis, BERT-language models, GPT-3 and GPT-4, and Python language.
Relevant Publications and Works
Fernanda Conforto de Oliveira (2022) The IMF as a ‘mantle of multilateral anonymity’: US-IMF-Brazil relations, 1956–9, Cold War History, DOI: 10.1080/14682745.2022.2078312
Review of Amy C. Offner, Sorting out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), in: Journal of Latin American Studies 53(3), August 2021.
Academic Work Experience
Research Experience
Researcher affiliate, Centre for Finance and Development (CFD), IHEID
Junior researcher, Laboratory for Studies about Brazil and the World (Labmundi), University of São Paulo
Fellowships, Grants and Awards
- Business History Conference: Chandler Travel Grant (2024)
- SNSF: Mobility grant (2023-2024)
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Transatlantic Studies Association: Travel Grant TSA 2022 (2022)
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Latin American Studies Association: Travel Grant LASA 2022 (2021)Fondation Pierre du Bois: Doctoral Workshop grant (2021)
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SNSF: Doc.CH Scholarship (2021-2024)
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Federal Commission for Scholarships: Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship (2020-2021)
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World Economic History Conference: Travel Grant WEHC Paris 2022 (2021)
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John F. Kennedy Library Foundation: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Fellowship (2020)
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Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation and Moody Foundation: Moody Research Grant (2020)
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Dwight Eisenhower Foundation: Eisenhower Foundation Abilene Travel Grant (2020)
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Harry S. Truman Library Institute: Research Grant (2020)
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Foundation Pierre du Bois: Research Grant (2020)
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Latin American Studies Association: Travel Grant LASA 2021 (2020)
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Graduate Institute in Geneva: Tuition fee waiver (2020-2024)
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Graduate Institute in Geneva: Ph.D. scholarship and tuition fee waiver (2019-2020)
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São Paulo Research Foundation: Master’s Scholarship (2016-2019)
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São Paulo Research Foundation: Research Internship Abroad Scholarship (2017)
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University of São Paulo: Academic Merit Award (2014)