Dr Graham Denyer Willis
Graham Denyer Willis is Associate Professor in Development Studies and Latin American Studies in the Department of Politics and International Studies, and a Fellow of Queens’ College.
Research Interests
His second book, Keep the Bones Alive: Missing People and the Search for Life in Brazil (2022), examines how and why 20,000 - 25,000 people go missing, per year, in São Paulo. Keep the Bones Alive explores this phenomenon and why there is little concern for those who vanish. he accompanies family members, state workers, and gravediggers to examine the rationalization underpinning why bodies are missing in space including cemeteries, the criminal coroner’s office, and prisons. By following the bereaved as they confront an indifferent state and suspicious society and search for loved ones against all odds, this book reveals where missing bodies go and the reasons why people can disappear without being pursued. Recognizing that disappearance has long been central to Brazil’s everyday political order, with some people pursued and others not, this humanistic account of the silences surrounding disappearance shows why a demand for a politics of life is needed more than ever.
Recent Publications:
- Denyer Willis, Graham. (2021). Mundane Disappearance: The Politics of Letting Disappear in Brazil. Economy and Society, 50(2), 297-321.
- Bueno, Samira and Graham Denyer Willis. (2019). The Exceptional Prison. Public Culture. 31(3), 645-663.
- Lessing, Ben and Graham Denyer Willis. (2019). Legitimacy in Criminal Governance: Regulating a Drug Empire from Behind Bars. American Political Science Review, 113(2), 584-606.
- Denyer Willis, Graham. (2018). The Potter’s Field. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 60 (3), 539-568.
- Denyer Willis, Graham. (2022). Keep the Bones Alive: Missing People and the Search for Life in Brazil. Oakland: University of California Press.
- Denyer Willis, Graham. (2015). The Killing Consensus: Police, Organized Crime and the Regulation of Life and Death in Urban Brazil. Oakland: University of California Press.