Oliveira’s intellectual formation is deeply interdisciplinary and transnational. He was alphabetized in both Portuguese and English in an international school in Brazil, then after his family immigrated to Florida, Oliveira pursued a liberal arts education at New College of Florida. After obtaining a dual bachelors degree in philosophy and religion, he continued studying political philosophy at the University of Colorado – Boulder, and then transitioned to geography at the University of California – Berkeley, pursuing more interdisciplinary and fieldwork-based research.
Oliveira’s doctoral research focused on Chinese investments in Brazilian agribusiness and related infrastructure. With over 27 months of ethnographic fieldwork across 16 states in Brazil and 8 provinces in China, this is among the most extensive and in-depth investigations to date on the creation and contestation of agroindustrial partnerships between Brazil and China.
At UC Berkeley, Oliveira also developed an advanced undergraduate course in Global Political Ecology (Geography 138), and worked as graduate student instructor for courses on Food and the Environment (Geography 130), Worldings: Peoples, Regions, and States (Geography 10), and Development in Theory and History (Development Studies 100).
In the fall of 2016, Oliveira was Visiting Scholar at the Northwest Agriculture and Forestry University in China, where he developed and taught an Advanced Social Science Seminar on Food, Development, and the Environment.
In 2017, Oliveira was awarded a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship and served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Swarthmore College. During 2017-2018, he developed and taught an advanced undergraduate seminar on Brazil, China, and the Global Food Environment (Environmental Studies 32), and the Environmental Studies Senior Capstone Seminar on Political Ecology: Agroecology (Environmental Studies 91).
During 2018-2019, Oliveira was appointed Visiting Assistant Professor at Peking University, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, where he developed new research in economic geography, critical geopolitics, and global political economy.
Since then, Oliveira joined the University of California – Irvine to collaborate in the establishment of the Department of Global and International Studies.
Oliveira is member of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network’s Science Panel of the Amazon, co-authoring two chapters in an interdisciplinary report scheduled to be released in 2021 ahead of the COP26 meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Oliveira’s contribution focuses on changes to landscapes and livelihoods in the Amazon driven by commercial agriculture, timber and mineral extraction, and infrastructure construction.
Oliveira is also member of the international secretariat of the BRICS Initiative for Critical Agrarian Studies, editor of the book Soy, Globalization, and Environmental Politics in South America (Routledge 2018, with Susanna Hecht), and guest editor of special issues in the Journal of Peasant Studies (v. 43, n. 2), Political Geography, the Canadian Journal of Development Studies, and Globalizations.