Former President of Brazil to Speak at Yale

Fernando Henrique Cardoso, two-term president of Brazil, will speak at Yale University as a Chubb Fellow, a Downey Fellow and a visiting fellow of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization.

Fernando Henrique Cardoso, two-term president of Brazil, will speak at Yale University as a Chubb Fellow, a Downey Fellow and a visiting fellow of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization.

Cardoso will deliver a free, public lecture on April 13 at 4:30 p.m. in Luce Hall Auditorium, 34 Hillhouse Ave.

Cardoso, who headed the government of Brazil from 1995 to 2002, is currently president of the Instituto Fernando Henrique Cardoso in São Paulo. Since 2003 he has been honorary president of the Party of the Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB), which he co-founded in 1988 to unite a large segment of Brazilians under a center-left ideology of free-market reform and social responsibility.

Prior to his election as president, Cardoso served as Minister of Finance and Minister of Foreign Affairs. He began his political career in 1978 as a protest candidate for the Brazilian Senate; the Supreme Court overruled the ruling dictatorship and granted him the right to run only two weeks before the election, in which he won 1.2 million votes. As the second place winner, he gained the Senate seat in 1983 when the winning candidate became governor of São Paulo. He was re-elected to the Senate in 1986.

Cardoso holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of São Paulo, where he was an assistant and associate professor of sociology from 1953 to 1964 and a professor of political science. He has also taught at Stanford, Cambridge, the University of Paris, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. From 2003 to 2007 he was professor at large at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. He has also served as president of the International Sociology Association. Cardoso has received honorary degrees from 26 universities, including the London School of Economics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Oxford, Cambridge, Rutgers and the universities of Moscow, Montreal and Bologna. His memoir, “The Accidental President of Brazil,” was published in 2006.