Machado de Assis: A Life in Literature
The International Seminar 2025 - Machado de Assis: A Life in Literature convened at the Council on Latin American & Iberian Studies at the Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut from 10 to 11 October 2025. The Yale Seminar brought together students, researchers, writers, and translators from universities on three continents to address questions of theme, philosophy, style, narratology and translation in Machado’s diverse writings in narrative prose, poetry, theater, criticism, journalism, and correspondence. The principal objective of the seminar was to stimulate and further the reception of the literary works of Machado de Assis in international comparative literature and world literature through study of his literary language, the aesthetic texture of his portraits of Brazilian society, his unrelenting irony, and his assimilation of a world of literature into texts that, beginning in 1880, surprise the reader with their experimental, open modernity.
Conference Committee
K. David Jackson, Yale University
João Almino, Academia Brasileira de Letras
Paul Dixon, Purdue University
Earl E. Fitz, Vanderbilt University
Hélio de Seixas Guimarães, Universidade de São Paulo
José Luís Jobim, Universidade Federal Fluminense
João Cezar Castro Rocha, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro
Sonia Netto Salomão, Universitàs Degli Studi Di Roma La Sapienza
Organizing Committee
Tim Stumph
Paola Martell
Enit Colon
Supporters
This seminar is made possible thanks to the generous support of the following:
The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund
The Whitney and Betty MacMillian Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University