Dear Michael,

Many thanks from the Brazilian HET community for your graceful tribute to
Mauro.

He was full of ideas for future research.

Best wishes,

Rogério Arthmar





Em quinta-feira, 7 de março de 2024, Hans-Michael Trautwein <
[log in to unmask]> escreveu:

> Tribute to Mauro Boianovsky (1959-2024)
>
> On February 21, Mauro Boianovsky passed away in Brasília at the age of 64,
> after some months of illness. Within few hours the internet was full of
> reactions to the death notice, mourning the great, and in many cases
> unexpected, loss for the community of historians of economic thought. If he
> had lived to see the signs of appreciation from all over the world, Mauro
> would have found them remarkable with regard to the fact that he had been
> based in Brasília for most of his life – quite distant from the usual
> places of education, research and interaction in HET even now, but much
> farther away in terms of travel and communication at the beginning of his
> career.
>
> Mauro took his first degree in economics at the Universidade de Brasília  in
> 1979. He completed his Master’s degree at the Pontifícia Universidade
> Católica (PUC) do Rio de Janeiro in 1989, after years of teaching at the
> Universidade Federal Fluminense across the bay. His Master’s thesis,
> supervised by Edward Amadeo, was the beginning of his life-long engagement
> with the theories of Knut Wicksell. As a Cambridge graduate student in the
> first half of the 1990s, Mauro worked on a doctoral thesis about Wicksell
> and contemporaneous business cycle theories, under the supervision of Geoff
> Harcourt. After earning his Ph.D. in 1996, he returned to the Universidade
> de Brasília, where he served as professor for the rest of his life.
>
> Mauro was a prolific writer in the history of macroeconomics, in
> particular with regard to the evolution of monetary theory, business cycle
> theory and development economics. The publication record in his official CV
> comprises 80 articles in scientific journals plus many other publications,
> including five books that he co-authored, edited or co-edited. Most of this
> was based on detective work in the archives, in which he collected all
> sorts of materials as pieces of evidence on the formation and diffusion of
> the ideas, concepts and theories under scrutiny. Rearranging them like
> pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that could take unexpected shapes in the process,
> he filled gaps and established overlooked linkages in the history of
> macroeconomics. Over time Mauro became a master of rich contextualization.
>
> While Wicksell remained the fixed star around which much of Mauro’s
> research evolved, he wrote copiously also about other economists and about
> the evolution of concepts. To name just a few of his favourite subjects, it
> may suffice to mention the names of Dennis Robertson, Ragnar Frisch, David
> Champernowne, Evsey Domar and Don Patinkin, the concepts of involuntary
> unemployment and natural rates of interest, and the making of Gottfried
> Haberler’s *Prosperity and Depression. *Around 2005, Mauro began to work
> on the Latin American history of development economics, with a special
> focus on the contributions of Celso Furtado, but also in more comprehensive
> perspectives.
>
> Coming from Brasília, Mauro needed to travel far and frequently for
> digging in the archives, attending conferences, and meeting with co-authors
> and other colleagues that invited him to their institutions. Quite aptly,
> he chose “Economists and their travels” as the topic for the presidential
> address that he delivered to the History of Economics Society in 2017. He
> had attended HES conferences since 1994 and served in various functions in
> that society, as described in his recollections published in the “HES at
> 50” issue of the *Journal of the History of Economic Thought *(February
> 2024). Mauro was also a regular participant in ESHET conferences and a
> member of the ESHET council from 2006 until 2010. He supported the
> formation and activities of ALAHPE, the Latin American network of
> historians of economic thought, not least by providing an encouraging
> example of a successful career in the international HET community. He had
> friends all over the world and will be greatly missed.
>
> Hans-Michael Trautwein
>
> (This is just a short tribute; a longer obituary will be published in the
> April issue of EJHET)
>