Leslie Michael Bethell[1] (born 12 February 1937) is an English historian and university professor, who specialises in the study of 19th- and 20th-century Latin America, focusing on Brazil in particular.
[2] He was a fellow of St Antony's College and founding director of the Centre for Brazilian Studies at the University of Oxford from 1997 to 2007.
[6] The work was praised widely, with the historian Paul Gootenberg noting that the series had "earned rave scholarly reviews throughout the 1990s".
[12][13][14] Bethell was elected a sócio correspondente [one of twenty foreign members] of the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 2010.
[15] He was nominated to fill the vacancy left by the death of the Portuguese author José Saramago, and was only the second English person to have been elected to the position, after the philosopher Herbert Spencer in 1898.