Leslie Michael Bethell is an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 historian, university professor, and Brazilianist

Brazilianist

Brazilianist typically is a non-Brazilian scholar, usually but not exclusively from North America, who specializes in studying, researching, teaching and publishing about Brazilian history, geography, culture, politics and/or language.There is great diversity of interests amongst Brazilianists...

 who specializes in the study of 19th and 20th Century Latin America

Latin America

Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages  – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...

, emphasizing on Brazil

Brazil

Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...

 in particular. He received both his Bachelor of Arts and Doctorate in History at the University of London

University of London

-20th century:Shortly after 6 Burlington Gardens was vacated, the University went through a period of rapid expansion. Bedford College, Royal Holloway and the London School of Economics all joined in 1900, Regent's Park College, which had affiliated in 1841 became an official divinity school of the...

. Bethell has served as Visiting Professor at the University Research Institute of Rio de Janeiro at the Universidade Cândido Mendes

Universidade Cândido Mendes

Universidade Cândido Mendes is a private university located in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is Latin America's oldest private university.-History:...

, the University of California, San Diego

University of California, San Diego

The University of California, San Diego, commonly known as UCSD or UC San Diego, is a public research university located in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, California, United States...

, and at the University of Chicago

University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

. He has been associated with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars , located in Washington, D.C., is a United States Presidential Memorial that was established as part of the Smithsonian Institution by an act of Congress in 1968...

, most recently being appointed Senior Scholar of their Brazil Institute, since 1987. He was the founding director of the Centre for Brazilian Studies at the University of Oxford

University of Oxford

The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...

, serving in that capacity from 1998 to 2007. He has also held lengthy academic posts at St Antony's College

St Antony's College, Oxford

St Antony's College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England.St Antony's is the most international of the seven all-graduate colleges of the University of Oxford, specialising in international relations, economics, politics, and history of particular parts of the...

 (as a Fellow) and at his alma mater, the University of London (as Director of the Institute of Latin American Studies and an Honorary Research Fellow).

He is the sole editor of the eleven volume Cambridge History of Latin America, a massive attempt at compiling and integrating the existing scholarship of Latin American studies

Latin American Studies

Latin American studies is an academic discipline dealing with the study of Latin America and Latin Americans.-Definition:Latin American studies critically examines the history, culture, politics, and experiences of Latin Americans in Latin America and often also elsewhere .Latin American studies...

. The entire product took more than fifteen years to be completed The work, was praised widely, with the historian Paul Gootenberg

Paul Gootenberg

Paul E. Gootenberg is a historian of Latin America who specializes in the history of the Andean drug trade, the fields of Peruvian and Mexican history, as well as historical sociology. He earned an M. Phil from the University of Oxford and a Ph. D...

 noting that the series had "earned rave scholarly reviews throughout the 1990s". The Library Journal

Library Journal

Library Journal is a trade publication for librarians. It was founded in 1876 by Melvil Dewey . It reports news about the library world, emphasizing public libraries, and offers feature articles about aspects of professional practice...

referred to the first two volumes of the series as "the most detailed, comprehensive, and authoritative work on the subject available", while the political scientist Paul W. Drake called various volumes in the set "landmark[s] in their field." Reviews were not completely positive, however, with some of the volumes being described as "unwieldy" and skewed too much to the present age. Alternately, the series has also been criticized for its lack of coverage of issues whose impacts have extended into contemporary times and of the trends that had been emerging in Latin America around the time of its various publication dates.

Bethell was elected a sócio correspondente of the Brazilian Academy of Letters

Academia Brasileira de Letras

Academia Brasileira de Letras is a Brazilian literary non-profit society established at the end of the 19th century by a group of 40 writers and poets inspired by the Académie Française. The first president, Machado de Assis, declared its foundation on December 15, 1896, with the statutes being...

 in 2010. He was nominated to fill the vacancy left by the death of the Portuguese author José Saramago

José Saramago

José de Sousa Saramago, GColSE was a Nobel-laureate Portuguese novelist, poet, playwright and journalist. His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the human factor. Harold Bloom has described Saramago as "a...

, and was only the second English person to have been elected to the position, after the philosopher Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era....

. Bethell was also elected as a correspondent to the Brazilian Academy of Sciences

Brazilian Academy of Sciences

The Brazilian Academy of Sciences is the national academy of Brazil. It is headquartered in the city of Rio de Janeiro and was founded in 1916....

 in 2004.

Selected works

• The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil and the Slave Trade Question (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970)
• The Cambridge History of Latin America (published originally from 1986 to 1995), essays from this work have been repeatedly repackaged in a multitude of forms put out by the Cambridge University Press
  Cambridge University Press
  Cambridge University Press is the publishing business of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII in 1534, it is the world's oldest publishing house, and the second largest university press in the world...
  
  .
• The Paraguayan War (1864-1870) (London: Inst. of Latin American Studies, 1996)
• Brazil by British and Irish Authors (Oxford:Centre for Brazilian Studies, 2003)