Leonardo Barleta

I am a Stanford Data Science Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford Data Science, where I work with Professor Zephyr Frank. I am a historian of Latin America, mainly interested in the historical production of space from the early colonization to modern times. I have worked on topics ranging from territorial formation and geographic mobility to land tenure and environmental change to modern urbanization—all of which apply data-driven approaches to historical investigation. As a Stanford Data Science Fellow, I am developing a project that examines the evolution of urban growth, spatial inequality, and housing vulnerability in the past fifty years. It combines AI-assisted landscape analysis of street-level imagery with GIS data and historical remote sensing to trace patterns of urban change in cities across the world.

I obtained my Ph.D. in History from Stanford University in 2021 and I hold an M.A. (2013) and B.A. (2010) in History from the Federal University of Paraná, Brazil, where I grew up.