Sandra Guardini Teixeira Vasconcelos comments on a few short stories which hover on the macabre and the sinister and challenge the imaging and representation of Brazil as a natural haven and tropical paradise. She suggests these stories foreground aspects of Brazilian society which did not fit into the country’s constructed self-image, but rather thematize the shadows of its slave past, violence and social inequities.

Thursday, 27 October
4:30 p. m. - 4:55 p. m. 
Corferias (Avenida La Esperanza with Carrera 39)
Free admission

Guest

Sandra Guardini Teixeira Vasconcelos (Brasil)

Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of São Paulo. She did postdoctoral studies at the University of Cambridge (1993-1994), at the University of Manchester (2008), and was Visiting Research Associate at the Centre for Brazilian Studies at the University of Oxford (2005). Over the past years, she has been carrying out research on the presence and circulation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novels in nineteenth-century Brazil. She has edited several books, has published articles and chapters both in Brazil and abroad and is the author of Puras Misturas. Estórias em Guimarães Rosa (1997), Dez Lições sobre o Romance Inglês do Século XVIII (2002), and A Formação do Romance Inglês: ensaios teóricos (2007), for which she got the 2008 Jabuti Prize for Literary Theory and Criticism. At present, she is the coordinator of the Laboratory for the Study of the Novel (LERo) and of the project 'The Global Novel', with researchers from the University of Surrey, UK. She is curator of the João Guimarães Rosa Archive, at the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros and holds a CNPq Research Productivity Grant.