Teaching
Credit: Vitor Vogel
My trajectory as a teacher began at age 16, when I volunteered to help prepare low-income students for university admission in my hometown of Rio de Janeiro. Teaching those early classes in Brazilian literature, history, and composition made me realize my passion for working with students and shaped my understanding of education as a vehicle of social change. I went on to gain further teaching experience as a teaching assistant and instructor of record at the State University of Rio de Janeiro and Stanford University. At the University of Chicago, where I have been a faculty member since 2015, I teach a range of courses on Brazilian literature and culture; modern and contemporary Latin American literature, culture, and history; the environmental humanities; and courses at UChicago’s humanities core. Below is a sample of courses I have taught in recent years:
The Amazon: Literature, Culture, Environment
From colonial travelers to contemporary popular culture, the Amazonian forest has been a source of endless fascination, greed and ecological concern. The numerous actors that have been shaping the region, including artists, writers, scientists, anthropologists, Indigenous peoples, and the extractive industry, among others, bring a multifaceted view of this region that has been described as the paradise on earth as much as a green hell. This course offers an overview of Amazonian history, cultures, and environmental issues that spans from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. What are the major topics, works, and polemics surrounding the ways the Amazon has been depicted and imagined? How can the region’s history help us understand the state of environmental policies and Indigenous rights today? What can we learn about the Amazon from literature and film? What is the future of the Amazon in the context of Brazil’s current political climate? From an interdisciplinary perspective, we will cover topics such as indigenous cultures and epistemologies, deforestation, travel writing, modern and contemporary literature, music, photography, and film, among others. Authors may include Claudia Andujar, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Euclides da Cunha, Susanna Hecht, Davi Kopenawa, the project Video in the Villages, among others. Taught in English, with readings available in English, Portuguese and Spanish.
Afro-Brazilian Literature
For most of Brazil’s colonial period and for decades after independence from Portugal, the country’s labor force consisted primarily of enslaved people from Africa and of African descent. The African diaspora is a crucial component in understanding Brazil’s history, society, economy, and culture. From the abolitionist prose of Maria Firmina dos Reis and Machado de Assis’s subtle reflections on race to the exponential growth of Afro-Brazilian authors in the mainstream of contemporary literature, such as Conceição Evaristo and Itamar Vieira Jr, Brazilian literature has been shaped by the rich diversity of African diasporic cultures as well as by the many challenges Afro-Brazilians face in a society that remains deeply unequal. In this course, we will explore Afro-Brazilian history and culture through literature. We will cover a century and a half of Afro-Brazilian literary production and understand how its main themes, potentials and challenges have evolved over the decades. We will discuss key concepts such as quilombismo, speaking place, confluence, and we will better understand the myth of racial democracy in Brazil. In addition to the authors mentioned above, we will read works by Abdias do Nascimento, Carolina Maria de Jesus, Djamila Ribeiro, and Ricardo Aleixo, among others.
Latin American Environmental Humanities
The environmental humanities have emerged in the past couple of decades as a crucial field to understand the multifaceted history of environmental thought and culture around the world as well as to grapple with the intractable challenges wrought by the current environmental crisis. In Latin America, the field has flourished in dialogue with Anglophone ecocriticism at the same time as it has expanded its thematic, theoretical, a critical reach. This course provides an overview of the environmental humanities in the context of Latin American literature and culture. We will delve into key concepts and problems in the field, from the debates on the Anthropocene and alternative terms to the cultural history of forests and deserts, subfields such as ecofeminism, plant studies, animal studies and energy humanities, as well as concepts particularly productive in the region such as (post)extractivism and multinaturalism. This course will combine primary sources, including works of literature, cinema and visual arts, with a robust attention to influential scholarship on the field. Taught in Spanish.
Disrupting Environmental Narratives: Colonialism, Race, and Toxicity
Co-taught with Nikhita Obeegadoo
The environmental humanities—that is, the study of nature and the environment through humanistic disciplines such as literary studies, history, cinema and media studies, and others—have long been dominated by texts and theories from privileged sections of Europe and North America. The prevalent model of the Anthropocene is one that pits a universal “Man” against an abstract “Nature.” But to what extent does this universal “Man” account for diverse experiences in terms of gender, race, citizenship, geography and health, just to name a few? How might the traditional environmental humanities be “disrupted” in order to make way for alternative understandings of our natural world, including the role of living beings within it, that have always existed and yet remain on the margins of academic discourse? And if we are to focus on works from the “Global South”—a label or grouping that may itself be problematic, and that we will critically engage with in the course—how do we account for internal divisions and hierarchies within this category, such as the oft-invisibilized archipelagoes of the Indian Ocean and the economic giants that are China and India?
In this course, we engage with works by contemporary writers, filmmakers and artists from parts of the world usually grouped as the “Global South” (a label we will interrogate within the course), as a means of nourishing our creative and critical understandings of what it means to tell stories about the various ecologies we inhabit. What is the role of storytelling from the Global South in our perception of environmental change and, particularly, in the current environmental crisis? How can novels, films, and short stories raise awareness of and emotional engagement with the racialized environmental impact of colonialism and coloniality in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America? Why and how do we tell, read, listen to, and watch stories from different parts of the world? In this course, we will explore the potential of narratives to powerfully challenge common assumptions regarding the environment, race, and power. We discuss how contemporary literature and film address and expose the continuities between colonial pasts and the growing levels of toxicity in multiple regions of the Global South. This course will provide a comprehensive examination of various narrative genres and tropes that have been instrumental in challenging and redefining established conventions from and environmental angle. These genres and tropes include, but are not limited to, horror fiction, the epistemological ethnocentrism frequently observed in travel accounts, and the notion of character as predominantly human-centric.
Latin American Civilization, Part III
Co-taught with Diana Schwartz Francisco
This course is the third part of a three-quarter sequence that aims to introduce the history and cultures of Latin America and the Caribbean. The quarter charts the social, political, and cultural dynamics of life in Latin America & the Caribbean during the long twentieth century–from capitalist expansion in the late-nineteenth century to the environmental crises of the early twenty-first.
While the course approaches modern Latin American life with broad brush, the fulcrum of our exploration and examination is “development,”as an idea, as a set of economic models and policy prescriptions, and as a proffered solution to enduring inequality in the region. By centering development and its discontents we will critically examine the various economic models adopted by Latin American countries since the late 19th century; explain why “development” became so central to the Latin American experience in the modern period; investigate why so many Latin American countries became increasingly unequal even as they grew more “developed;” and consider some of the dramatic social, racial, cultural, political, and environmental consequences of 20th and early 21st-century development policies. Our lectures and case studies will include film, autobiography, and primary source documents, as well as academic texts.