Sara Brandellero is a University Lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society.

More information about Sara Brandellero

Sara Brandellero is Assistant Professor at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS), where she has been based since 2011.  She is currently Project Leader on the HERA-funded project Night Spaces: migration, culture and integration in Europe (NITE), 2019-22, and was Fellow of the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute of Advanced Studies in Germany (2021).

Fields of interest

Brazilian Literature, Film and Culture; Lusophone Cultures; Night Studies; Migration and Diaspora; Gender; Space, Place and Landscape; Interculturality; Postcoloniality.

Background & Research

Prior to joining Leiden, Sara Brandellero taught at the University of Oxford, where she was also Senior Research Associate at the Oxford Centre for Brazilian Studies, before moving to the University of Leeds. At Leiden, her teaching is concentrated in the fields of Brazilian and Lusophone literature and visual cultures, but she also teaches on Latin American  culture,  narratives of migration and urban space, representations of the urban night.  Her research focuses on the cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world, including in transnational perspective, with a special focus on Brazil and Portuguese-speaking Africa. Her work centres on literature and film, with a particular attention to travel and migrant and diasporic narratives, postcolonialism, (de)constructions of national identity, gender, space and landscape. This has led to the completion of several projects on Brazilian modernism, Afro-Brazilian women literature,  spatial politics, the road movie in the Lusophone world, on which she has published widely.

Her interest in mobility and space has more recently taken on a keener attention to the dimension of time.  Her current major project focuses on experiences and cultural representations of the night. She is Project Leader of the European collaborative project Night Spaces: migration, culture and integration in Europe (NITE), funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA), 2019-22.  This project brings together the Universities of Leiden, UCL, Humboldt/Leuphana, Aarhus and Limerick, in studying public spaces at night associated with diverse migrant communities in 8 European cities – (nightspace.net).

Sara Brandellero is founding member and co-leader of REBRAC (European Network of Brazilianists working in Cultural Analysis). Founded in 2014 with Prof. S. Dennison (Leeds) and Dr. T. Holmes (Queen’s Belfast).  https://rebrac.net/page/1/

She has held Visiting Professorships at the University of São Paulo (UNESP/Araraquara, Brazil), 2015, and at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (Brazil, 2014). In 2012 she was Research Fellow at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute of Advanced Studies in Germany.  Since 2017, she is Co-Chair of the BA, MA and ResMA programmes in Latin American Studies at Leiden.

Teaching activities

Brazilian and Lusophone literature and visual cultures, Latin American culture, narratives of migration and urban space, representations of the urban night. 

Curriculum vitae

Dr. Brandellero holds a BA in Hispanic Studies from the University of Cardiff, an MA in Brazilian Literature from the University of Brasilia and a DPhil in Portuguese (Brazilian Literature) from the University of Oxford. She held lectureships at the University of Oxford and University of Leeds (UK), before joining the University of Leiden in September 2011.

Key publications

On a Knife-Edge: The Poetry of João Cabral de Melo Neto (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Living (Il)legalities in Brazil: Practices, Narratives and Institutions in a Country on the Edge. Co-edited with Dr Derek Pardue and Dr Georg Wink (Routledge, 2020).

Graciliano Ramos and the Making of Modern Brazil: Memory, Politics and Identities. Co-edited with Dr. Lúcia Villares (University of Wales Press, 2017).

The Brazilian Road Movie: Journeys of (Self)Discovery (University of Wales Press, 2013).

Activities