Dr Sara Brandellero invited visiting professor in São Paulo
Dr Sara Brandellero, Assistant Professor in Brazilian Studies (LUCAS), was invited by the State University of São Paulo (UNESP/Araraquara) and the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCAR) as visiting professor for the week of 8-12 June 2015.
Lecture series
During her stay at UNESP & UFSCAR under the aegis of the institutions’ postgraduate schools and research programmes, Dr Brandellero delivered a lecture series on ‘Journeys and Landscapes in Brazilian Literature’ and gave a paper on ‘Memory, Travels and the Hinterland in the Contemporary Brazilian Film’. Still in the field of cinema, Dr Brandellero was invited to take part in a roundtable discussion of the acclaimed feature film Viajo porque preciso, volto porque te amo (I Travel Because I Have To, I Return Because I Love You), dir. Karim Aïnouz and Marcelo Gomes, 2009), which followed a public screening at UFSCAR.
This was the second invitation as visiting professor to Brazil this academic year for Dr Brandellero. In December 2014, she was visiting professor in film at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF), at the invitation of the university’s Institute of Arts. While at UFJF, Dr Brandellero gave a lecture series and research paper on ‘Mobility in Latin American Cinema’.
An emerging power
While in São Paulo, the lecture series provided the opportunity for an enriching forum for discussion and exchange on the intersection between mobility and spatial politics in contemporary Brazilian literature, one of the areas of Dr Brandellero’s current research. Brazil, a country of continental proportions, the history of which is rooted in the experience of colonization and internal and transnational migration, can be fruitfully considered through the critical lens of mobility, in order to home in on how its culture has responded to its internal challenges as well as its current status as an emerging power on the global stage. Sara Brandellero: ‘Topics discussed during the lecture series included literary renditions of mass internal migration in the 20th century, particularly from rural to urban areas, literary articulations of diaspora in contemporary Afro-Brazilian culture and representations of trans-Atlantic displacement through the figure of the economic migrant at a time of global financial uncertainty.’
The research paper on film that Dr Brandellero delivered in addition to the lectures stemmed from her current research on mobility in Brazilian cinema and considered the remapping of national landscapes in the contemporary road movie.
Research profile
Dr Sara Brandellero’s research focuses on literature and film and engages more specifically with issues of national identity, the relationship with history and politics, gender studies, diaspora, mobility, landscape and the environment. This has involved work on modernist and contemporary writing in postcolonial and postdictatorial perspectives, Afro-Brazilian literature in comparative framework, and travel narratives and mobility in film. Her publications include the book On a Knife-Edge: The Poetry of João Cabral de Melo Neto (Oxford University Press, 2011) and the edited volume The Brazilian Road Movie: Journeys of (Self)Discovery (University of Wales Press, 2013). She is currently finalizing a co-edited volume (with Dr Lúcia Villares, Cambridge) entitled Graciliano Ramos and the Making of Modern Brazil (for University of Wales Press). LUCAS wishes her lots of success in developing a project on mobility in Latin American film (with particular focus on Brazil) and transatlantic exchanges in Luso-African film!