Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown

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Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown The Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University is one of the nation's premier institutions for the study of the Lusophone world.

We are happy to welcome Jack Astacio, a Visiting Ivy Plus Exchange Scholar to the department this semester! Jack Astacio...
09/09/2026

We are happy to welcome Jack Astacio, a Visiting Ivy Plus Exchange Scholar to the department this semester!

Jack Astacio is a scholar whose work interrogates q***rness and crisis in cultural production from the Hispanic Caribbean and Brazil. Currently, he is a Ph.D. candidate in the Spanish and Portuguese section of the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University. While at Brown, he will be working with Dr. Leila Lehnen as he finishes the final chapter of his dissertation, which reads the apocalypse as a q***r space in contemporary Latin American literature, music, and art.

We are so pleased to welcome Rafaela Carvalhinho as a new graduate student in the Portuguese & Brazilian Studies Departm...
09/09/2026

We are so pleased to welcome Rafaela Carvalhinho as a new graduate student in the Portuguese & Brazilian Studies Department!

Rafaela Carvalhinho's research focuses on contemporary Brazilian and Lusophone literatures, particularly marginalized narratives and their intersections with politics, social justice, memory, and resistance. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Nantes, France, where she studied women’s writing through the works of Annie Ernaux, Clarice Lispector, and Lydia Davis. Her undergraduate thesis examined the translation of Jane Austen’s “Ode to Pity” into Portuguese, with a focus on stylistic and cultural nuances. Before joining Brown, she taught Portuguese to immigrants and refugees from French-speaking African countries through the Releitores University Extension Project, preparing students for the CELPE-Bras proficiency examination. Her broader interests include literary translation and the circulation of Brazilian and Lusophone literature across languages and borders.

We are very excited to welcome Yasmin Siqueira as a new graduate student in the Portuguese & Brazilian Studies departmen...
09/09/2026

We are very excited to welcome Yasmin Siqueira as a new graduate student in the Portuguese & Brazilian Studies department!

Born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, Yasmin holds a master's degree in Romance Languages from the University of Georgia, as well as a bachelor's degree and teaching degree in Language and Literature (Portuguese and English) from the University of São Paulo. During the 2023-2024 academic year, she served as a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant in Portuguese at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. Her research interests include women's writing, Afro-Brazilian literature, the environmental humanities, life writing, and literature and cinema. Outside academia, she enjoys traveling, spending quality time with family and friends, savoring good food, exploring new places, and photography.

A warm welcome to our Fall 2026 Fulbright Visiting professor, Stefania Chiarelli!Stefania Chiarelli is a Full Professor ...
09/08/2026

A warm welcome to our Fall 2026 Fulbright Visiting professor, Stefania Chiarelli!

Stefania Chiarelli is a Full Professor of Brazilian literature at UFF; she holds a Ph.D. in Literary Studies from PUC-Rio (2005) . She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Rome La Sapienza (2020) and has published the books O cavaleiro inexistente de Italo Calvino: uma alegoria contemporânea (EDUCS, 1999) and Vidas em trânsito: as ficções de Samuel Rawet e Milton Hatoum (Annablume, 2007). She has also co-edited several anthologies on contemporary Brazilian literature. Her most recent publications are Partilhar a língua - leituras do contemporâneo (7Letras, 2022), Epigramas críticos (Pangeia/Eduff, 2025), and Histórias de água: o imaginário marítimo em narrativas brasileiras, portuguesas e africanas (Peter Lang, 2023), edited with Kathrin Sartingen. She was a Visiting Professor at the University of Rennes 2 as part of the International Chair in Humanities and Social Sciences (2025). As a literary critic, she contributes to the newspapers Estado de Minas, Folha de São Paulo and Rascunho.

This semester, she will be teaching the course Imaginários aquáticos na prosa brasileira.

A warm welcome to our Fall 2026 Fundação Luso-Americana Visiting professor Margarida Rendeiro.Margarida Rendeiro is a te...
09/08/2026

A warm welcome to our Fall 2026 Fundação Luso-Americana Visiting professor Margarida Rendeiro.

Margarida Rendeiro is a tenured Assistant Researcher at the Centre for the Humanities (CHAM), NOVA FCSH, Lisbon, where she coordinates the Research Group on Transcultural, Literary, and Postcolonial Studies. She holds a PhD in Portuguese Studies from King’s College London. Her work focuses on Afro-Luso-Brazilian literary and cultural production, relational solidarities, cultural resistance, and women’s studies. She is co-editor of Writing of Women as Cultural Resistance (V&R-Brill, 2026) and Challenging Memories and Rebuilding Identities (Routledge, 2019). She served as Principal Investigator of the project Women’s Literature: Memories, Peripheries, and Resistances in the Luso-Afro-Brazilian Atlantic and contributes to research projects on women in literature and the visual arts, as well as on contemporary Portuguese-language historical fiction, both based at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil.

This semester, she will teach the course Entangled Memories: Heritage, Sustainability, and Communities in Portugal and Lusophone Africa.

The Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies is pleased to announce that the latest issue of Gávea-Brown, vol. 51,...
07/01/2026

The Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies is pleased to announce that the latest issue of Gávea-Brown, vol. 51, no. 1 is now online.

Gávea-Brown: A Bilingual Journal of Portuguese-North American Letters and Studies is published by the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University. The journal was founded in 1980 as part of Gávea- Brown Publications, a publishing house dedicated to making Portuguese literature and culture better known in the English-speaking world. The journal’s mission is to publish works relating to the Portuguese experience in North America. The scope is broad, including editorially reviewed academic articles, documents, interviews, translations, book reviews, and creative works. In 2018, the Gávea- Brown journal, until then a leading journal published only in print, shifted to online publication in order to expand access to Portuguese-North American literature and studies.

You can access the current issue by visiting the Gávea-Brown page on our website or the Brown Digital Repository at this link: https://doi.org/10.26300/khn0-z586

We would like to send our special thanks to our editors, copy editors and everyone at the BDR for putting this online and congratulations to all of our authors. Happy Reading!








We are pleased to announce that the latest issue of Pessoa Plural, no. 29, is now online. It includes two special issues...
06/23/2026

We are pleased to announce that the latest issue of Pessoa Plural, no. 29, is now online. It includes two special issues: Unveiling The Duke of Parma (guest edited by Enrico Martines) and O drama em mito(s) (guest edited by Rui Sousa, Mafalda Sofia Borges Soares, and Filipe Senos Ferreira).

Pessoa Plural—A Journal of Fernando Pessoa Studies (ISSN: 2212-4179) is an international peer-reviewed scholarly journal dedicated to studies of Fernando Pessoa. It is published jointly by the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University, the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick University, and the Department of Humanities and Literature of the University of the Andes.

The journal publishes essays, documents and commissioned book reviews. All submitted articles are initially screened by the editors. If judged pertinent to the journal, then they are submitted to a process of double-blind review. It is our aim to publish the best scholarship and criticism on Fernando Pessoa, regardless of theoretical methodological or ideological perspective.

You can access the current issue by visiting the Pessoa Plural page on the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies website, or see below for the Table of Contents. You can also access the entire issue, as well as past issues, in the Pessoa Plural collection at the Brown Digital Repository.

We would like to extend our special thanks to the editors, copy editors, and everyone at the Brown Digital Repository for putting this online, and congratulations to all of the authors!

Cover art by PIO Kaliński

Parabéns to the Class of 2026!On Sunday, May 24th, the Department of Portuguese & Brazilian Studies celebrated the gradu...
05/27/2026

Parabéns to the Class of 2026!
On Sunday, May 24th, the Department of Portuguese & Brazilian Studies celebrated the graduation of undergraduate concentrator Henry Robbins, as well as Maria Frigotto's transitional A.M., and the Ph.D. completions of Kevin William Ennis, Joyce Silva Fernandes, and Torin Kees Spangler.

Henry Robbins graduated magna cm laude with a double concentration in Portuguese & Brazilian Studies and History. He was also awarded the prestigious Karina P. Lago Memorial Prize, which is given annually to an outstanding concentrator in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies.

Maria Frigotto received her transitional master's degree, writing a thesis under the supervision of Patrícia Martinho Ferreira entitled "As We Break: Afro-Indigenous Routes of Blackness in the Brazilian Theatrical Adaptation of The Dark Side of Skin."

Kevin William Ennis completed his Ph.D., defending a dissertation under the supervision of Leila Lehnen entitled "Narrative Streams of Extractivism in Amazonia."

Joyce Silva Fernandes completed her Ph.D., defending a dissertation under the supervision of Patrícia Martinho Ferreira entitled "African Women’s Short Fiction in Portuguese."

Torin Kees Spangler completed his Ph.D., defending a dissertation under the co-supervision of Leonor Simas-Almeida and Luiz Valente entitled "Steamboats and Kiandas: The Nineteenth-Century Kwanza Riverscape in Modern Angolan Literature."

At the end of each semester, the POBS community gathers together for an evening celebrating the achievements and talents...
05/27/2026

At the end of each semester, the POBS community gathers together for an evening celebrating the achievements and talents of students in the Department of Portuguese & Brazilian Studies. Learners showcase their language skills and creativity in a series of varied and dynamic exhibitions and performances in Portuguese. Students at all levels demonstrate their linguistic progress through recitations, readings, musical performances, and multimedia presentations. The event not only highlights the department's commitment to immersive language learning but also strengthens our connections to the rich cultural traditions of Portugal, Brazil, and other Portuguese-speaking countries. Faculty, staff, students, and community members alike look forward to this special evening that bridges classroom learning with real-world expression and celebrates the journey of language acquisition in all its forms.

Parabéns, Dr. Spangler!We are very happy to announce that our PhD candidate Torin Spangler successfully defended his dis...
05/04/2026

Parabéns, Dr. Spangler!

We are very happy to announce that our PhD candidate Torin Spangler successfully defended his dissertation, "Steamboats and Kiandas: The Nineteenth-Century Riverscape in Modern Angolan Literature," last month.

The defense committee consisted of Leonor Simas-Almeida, Luiz Valente, and
Gabriel Rocha.

The Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies extends our warmest congratulations to Dr. Spangler on this significant academic achievement! Please join us in celebrating her accomplishment and wishing him success in future endeavors!

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