Warren Dean, the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of History at New York University, died May 21, 1994, one day after arriving in Santiago, Chile. Gas escaping from a defective line asphyxiated him in his sleep in the apartment he had rented. He was in Chile to begin a three-month research project on the western section of the Amazon. His sudden and untimely death left his colleagues shocked and dismayed.
Warren Dean’s scholarship was not only seminal but extensive. His first two monographs, The Industrialization of São Paulo (1969) and Rio Claro: A Brazilian Plantation System, 1820—1920 (1976), established his reputation as a sensitive and thorough specialist on the Brazilian center- south in its broadest dimensions. Rio Claro, which earned comparison to Stanley J. Stein’s classic book on Vassouras, had a major impact on slavery studies. Warren then turned to the questions of Brazilian land use and ownership, immigration, and, in the 1980s, the geopolitical consequences of Amazonian environmental destruction. He conjoined botanical knowledge with economic history to achieve solid, revisionist results that were, on occasion, as Kenneth Maxwell has noted, more often borrowed than recognized.
The exemplary monograph Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber (1987) followed from this interest, as did With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Coastal Forest (forthcoming). These works spanned broad academic boundaries and informed policymaking as well. Warren was also planning an “oncology” of São Paulo city, the result of his career-long fascination with urban history and especially that of the paulista megalopolis. We will never know to what further innovative vistas Warren’s work might have taken him had he lived.
Born in Passaic, New Jersey, he moved with his family to Miami in 1946. A forebear on his father’s side was the editor of an abolitionist newspaper in Rhode Island and member of the state assembly who resigned his seat in protest against what he considered the corruption of his fellow legislators.
Warren earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Miami in 1953. As an undergraduate he took the obligatory ROTC training, graduating as a commissioned second lieutenant in the Air Force. With the Korean conflict in full swing, he was posted to an air base in northern Maine, where he spent two years as an air traffic controller. After discharge he took a job as a buyer at Bloomingdale s in New York, where he worked for three years before matriculating for graduate degrees in Latin American history at the University of Florida. He received his Ph. D. in 1964.
He taught at the University of Texas at Austin from 1965 to 1970 before moving to NYU. He served as department chair and graduate director at NYU and as a visiting professor at the Universities of São Paulo and Paraná. He received a Foreign Area Teaching Fellowship in 1962-63, a Social Science Research Council fellowship in 1968, and in 1980 was designated a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellow. In 1991 he became a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Warren participated actively in the life of the profession and served on the HAHR board of editors. For nearly 25 years he was a regular participant in the Columbia University Seminars on Latin America and Brazil. He ably sustained NYU s long commitment to Brazilian studies.
Warren was a formidable worker. In every case, his published research broke new ground, reflecting his intellectual daring and curiosity. He quietly trained himself in new disciplines and skills: to prepare for his environmental research, he studied at the New York Botanical Garden (where he received a formal certificate in 1986) and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. On a visit to my university, where he graciously met with graduate students for most of the day on the spur of the moment, he remarked to me in passing that he was going to consult a series of Dutch botanical periodicals in our library and had taught himself Dutch so he could read them. His remarkable capacity to retain his sense of wonder about the New World and to throw himself into projects of increasingly greater range and originality marked him as one of the true pioneers of his generation.
Humane and sympathetic, consistent, and faithful to his ideals, Warren was at his best, as a colleague remarked, when he was most critical. He was a person of high moral principle, even when it exacted a personal cost, and he committed his ideas to moral action. During the 1970s he helped organize the American Committee for Information on Brazil, a watchdog group that documented and denounced the Brazilian military government’s systematic use of torture. He could be sharp and prickly, a colleague noted, if he was ever called on to compromise his own values and principles; but for the same reason he was a warm and supportive friend whenever he believed an injustice had been done. Unassuming and friendly, he went out of his way to nurture his students, and as a result his former students remained unflaggingly loyal to him. He not only advised them but offered trenchant comments to graduate students from other universities as well. He worked alongside his students with a gifted personal touch; in 1985, for example, he and some of his Latino students translated and edited a book of essays on U.S. hemispheric relations. Younger scholars remarked that he was both very interesting and very approachable. Marilyn Young, NYU’s current department chair, remarked that she had “never met a man of such complete integrity—moral, intellectual, and personal.”
Warren was unprepossessing, a bit shy; not outgoing, but always interested in meeting people individually. He loved to chat with Latin American visitors, especially Brazilians, and he extended an open invitation to have coffee at the Violet Cafe off Washington Square. In Rio one year, he rented a room in the house of two elderly ladies in Laranjeiras, who told him all kinds of stories about how they had resisted the police during street demonstrations. In New York, he and his wife, Liz, often housed Brazilian colleagues, to whom Warren generously offered his time to make contacts, offer research suggestions, and discuss their work. Two days before he died, he breakfasted in New York, along with other colleagues, with Lula, the Brazilian PT (Workers’ Party) presidential candidate for 1995.
Warren had a wry sense of humor and a characteristic laugh. His audience at a talk at Rio’s Universidade Federal Fluminense in the early 1980s remembered his comment about his work on the Atlantic rainforest: “If you think it’s hard researching working-class people who don’t leave written records, try studying trees.”
Warren was unusually respected in Brazil for his personal decency, his manifest passion for that country and its people, and his scholarship, much of which was translated into Portuguese. He also translated and edited a book of essays by the sociologist Florestan Fernandes, Reflections on the Brazilian Counter-Revolution (1981). In his introduction, he explained that he had taken on this task because he wanted non-Brazilian readers to be able to read Fernandes, to help them understand the “present and the proximate future of Brazil.” Warren’s Brazilian counterparts respected him also because although he knew Brazil remarkably well, he was optimistic about its future. The newsweekly Veja’s obituary noted that Warren was “a Brazilianist of the progressive school who [had] condemned the support given by the United States to the Brazilian dictatorship.”
Warren is survived by his wife, Elizabeth McArdle Dean, of Manhattan; his mother, Gabrielle Bach, of Miami; a daughter, Julia; and a son, Thomas.
Author notes
University of Miami
