Jeffrey Lesser is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History at Emory University.  His new book, Living and Dying in São Paulo: Immigrants, Health, and the Built Environment in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2025; Editora UNESP, 2025), focuses on a multi-ethnic, working class, neighborhood to analyze how the state creates and enacts health policies and asks why different immigrant groups often generate similar responses to state actions. Lesser is also the author of a number of prize-winning books published in English, Portuguese, Japanese, and Hebrew: Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Question (University of California Press/Imago Editora/Tel Aviv University Press);Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil (Duke University Press/Editora UNESP/Akashi Shoken); A Discontented Diaspora: Japanese-Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy (Duke University Press/Editora Paz e Terra); and most recently Immigration, Ethnicity and National Identity in Brazil (Cambridge University Press/Editora UNESP).  Lesser is the winner of multiple teaching awards and has won national and international fellowships from Fulbright, Fulbright-Hays, the Social Science Research Council, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies.