Roberta Marx Delson

Roberta Marx Delson (1945-)

Roberta Delson is a Research Associate in Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History (New York City) and an adjunct Associate Professor of History at Drew University (Madison, New Jersey).

Roberta was born in New York in 1945. When she had nearly completed her Masters of Art studies at the Anthropology Department and Latin American Studies Program, Columbia University a chance meeting changed her study direction completely:

"I was had signed up for a required but much dreaded course in Latin American history beginning the fall semester of 1967. And it was here I discovered E. Bradford Burns (or 'Brad' as I affectionately came to know him), who was the professor, and from his very first lecture I was hooked, eventually changing my field of study to get a Ph.D. in history".

She even began her first book "The Jewish community of Porto Alegre: a minority group adjusts" (1969).

She continued studies in international relations, anthropology and history at Syracuse and Columbia universities in New York and her Doctorate of Philosophy dissertation was on urban planning in colonial Brazil (1975), later published as "Town Planning in Colonial Brazil" (1980).

She has published on Caribbean and Brazilian economic history and Brazilian urbanism.

In 1981 Roberta began editing a series of seven books for Caribbean Studies with an editorial board consisting of Laennec Hurbon (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris France), Frank Moya Pons (Fondo para el Avance del las Clencias Socials, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic), J. Edward Greene (Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, Kingston Jamaics), and Betty Sedoc-Dehlberg (Center for Latin American Studies, University of Florida, Gainesville, USA).

In her latest essay in "The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 1650-2000", Roberta offers evaluations of the concept of proto-industrialization in her chapter "Brazil: the origin of the textile industry" she focused on ethnicity and migration, she finds “significant deviations from European models” (p. 650) and emphasizes the use of unfree labor in textile production in Africa and the Americas, in contrast to practices within Europe.

Selected Publications

• The Jewish community of Porto Alegre: a minority group adjusts (1968)
• New Towns For Colonial Brazil: Spatial and social planning of the eighteenth century (1979)
• Town planning in colonial Brazil (1980)
• Readings in Caribbean history and economics: an introduction to the region (1981)
• New Jersey schools: recommendations for conservation of the legacy (1984, 1997 in Portuguese)
• Perspectives on landscape change in Brazil (1984)
• with John P. Dickenson, Enterprise under colonialism: a study of pioneer industrialization in Brazil 1700-1830 (1991)
• Inland navigation in colonial Brazil: Using canoes on the Amazon (1995)
• Cargo canoes of the eighteenth-century Amazon: A preliminary stability analysis (1995)