Alida Metcalf teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Latin American history. Her undergraduate courses include Brazil: Continuities and Changes, Latin American Perspectives, and Rio de Janeiro: A Social and Architectural History (with Farès el-Dahdah). At the graduate level, she regularly offers seminars in the history of the Luso-Atlantic World, Brazil, and Colonial Latin America. She is accepting Ph.D. students in Latin American History, especially those interested in Brazil. Metcalf directs the Dual Degree program between the history departments of Rice and the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil, which allows highly talented graduate students to earn two Ph.Ds, one from Rice and one from UNICAMP. Metcalf’s current research focuses on the history of water in Rio de Janeiro. With Fares el-Dahdah she co-directs imagineRio, a digital humanities project on the social and architectural history of Rio de Janeiro.

Undergraduate and graduate students can participate in the development of the diachronic digital atlas imagineRio and learn historical Geographical Information Systems (GIS), image processing and management (Photoshop, JSTORforum, ArtStor),  digital character recognition (OCR), and database management (Airtable). Metcalf welcomes inquiries from undergraduates interested in independent research projects for a summer- or semester-long project, or for a year-long History honors thesis, Mellon Mays, or Rice Undergraduate Scholars Program (RUSP) thesis.  She welcomes graduate students as Research Assistants for the imagineRio project.