Machado de Assis: A Life in Literature
Speaker Biographies
Anil Kumar Yadav is an accomplished scholar in the fields of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies, with a specialized focus on the Portuguese language and Lusophone cultures. He holds a Ph.D. from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, with his doctoral fieldwork undertaken at the University of Porto, Portugal, under the prestigious Bolsa de Investigação awarded by Instituto Camões, Lisbon (Portugal). Dr. Yadav is currently serving as Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic and Romance Studies at the University of Delhi, where he teaches Portuguese language, literature, and translation. From Rio to Benaras: Machado de Assis and Premchand between Marginalisation, Ethics, and Comparative Aesthetics |
Craig Osterbrock earned his B.A. in English Literature and Spanish Philology from Wittenberg University (2013) and his Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese from Yale University in 2024. His dissertation studies the poetics of translation of Brazilian poets Augusto de Campos and Ana Cristina Cesar, with a theoretical focus on the various material lives of translations made by Campos and Cesar. He is currently at work on a book manuscript based on his dissertation, titled The Timbre of Translation. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in peer-reviewed journals such as Santa Barbara Portuguese Studies and Hermeneus, as well as in the edited volume Poesia-Crítica-Tradução: Haroldo de Campos e a educação dos sentidos (Ed. K. David Jackson and Eduardo Jorge; Peter Lang, 2022). On Late Style in Machado de Assis and Henry James |
Earl Fitz is Professor of Portuguese, Spanish, and Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches classes on Brazilian literature, comparative approaches to Latin American literature, and the theory and practice of literary translation. He is the author of the just published study, The Evolution of Literature in the Americas (2025) and (forthcoming) The Literatures of Spanish America and Brazil: The Twentieth Century. The Reception of Machado de Assis in the United States |
Eduardo F. Coutinho (PhD U.C.Berkeley) is a Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at UFRJ and a Level 1A Researcher at CNP1. He has also served as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois, USA. He was a founding member and President of ABRALIC and Vice President of AILC/ICLA. Among his books are The Synthesis Novel in Latin America (1980), Literatura Comparada: Reflexões (2013), Rompendo Barreiras: Ensaios (2014), Brazilian Literature (ed., 2018), and Diágolos Interculturais: Ensaios de comparatismo latino-americano (2024). Machado de Assis e a Escravidão |
Eviatar Oren is a doctoral student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. His interests include modern and contemporary fiction from Brazil and Spanish America, theory and history of the novel and of the short story, world literature, linguistic and literary pragmatics, and literary reception. Eviatar holds a B.A. in Linguistics and in the AMIRIM Interdisciplinary Honors Program in the Humanities from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2017) and an M.A. in Spanish and Latin American Studies from the same university (2022). Liberalism and Nationalism in "Instinto de Nacionalidade" |
Fernanda Gasparini is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Classical and Vernacular Languages at the University of São Paulo (USP), with a master's degree in the same area. Her dissertation, defended in 2024, addresses the racialization of characters in Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas and the analysis of this racialization in the novel's English translations. Her current research seeks to analyze how racialized characters were constructed throughout Machado de Assis's novels, from Ressurreição to Memorial de Aires. Raciality and Racialization: The Construction of White, Non-White, and Non-Racialized Characters, and Their Dynamics in Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas |
Fernando Borsato dos Santos is a PhD candidate in the Brazilian Literature Program at the University of São Paulo (USP), where he is conducting research on Authorship in the Novels of Machado de Assis. He holds a Master’s degree in Letters from the same institution, having defended the dissertation The Signature of Machado de Assis: A Study on the Figurations of Authorship. He is a member of the CNPq Research Group on Literary Authorship: History, Current Issues, and Perspectives, and serves as editorial assistant for Machado de Assis em linha – Electronic Journal of Machado Studies. As assinaturas de Machado de Assis: unidade e dispersão autoral nos romances |
Hélio de Seixas Guimarães is Associate Professor at the University of São Paulo, a researcher at CNPq, and Deputy Director of the Biblioteca Brasiliana Guita e José Mindlin. He is the author of Machado de Assis, o escritor que nos lê (Editora Unesp, 2017) and Os leitores de Machado de Assis (Nankin/Edusp, 2004; 2nd ed., 2012), among other books and articles. Guimarães recently organized the 26-volume collection Todos os Livros de Machado de Assis, published by Todavia with support from Itaú Cultural. He has served as a visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and as a Tinker Visiting Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Paratexts and the Figuration of Authorship in English-Language Editions of Brás Cubas |
Ingrid Brioso Rieumont is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Dartmouth College. She specializes on modern Latin American literature and culture, with a focus on the Hispanophone Caribbean and Brazil. She works at the intersection of literary criticism, and philosophy, with attention to the interplay between transatlantic slavery, Marxism, and form. Her work has appeared in Latin American Literary Review, Cuban Studies, Revista Brasileira de Literatura Comparada and Revista Casa de las Américas. She is completing a book manuscript tentatively entitled, The Edges of Slavery: Pre-birth and the Post-mortem in Nineteenth-Century Cuba and Brazil. Machado de Assis’s Helena (1876) and the Politics of Legibility |
Laurie Lomask is associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Borough of Manhattan Community College, of the City University of New York (CUNY), where she designed the program in Portuguese language. Her research explores the connections between literature and movement arts, including walking, dance, and community theater. She was co-editor of the personal correspondence of Benito Pérez Galdós (Cátedra, 2016) and is a member of the organizing committee for the international conference Vallejo Siempre. Her recent publications include “Survival of the Malandro” (Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2024) and a forthcoming chapter on teaching Galdós’ theatrical works. She is currently conducting research on the origins of samba carioca. Itinerancy and Identity in Quincas Borba |
Amb. João Almino is a Brazilian writer and diplomat. He obtained his Doctor degree in Paris under the direction of philosopher Claude Lefort. He taught at the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM), at the University of Brasília (UnB), the Instituto Rio Branco, Berkeley, Stanford and the University of Chicago. In 2017 he was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters. His works of political science and philosophy have been a reference source for the study of authoritarianism and democracy in Brazil. They include the following books: The Authoritarian Democrats, The Age of the Present, Secrecy and Information, Once Upon a Time a Constituent Assembly and Still Life: The Political Philosophy of Ecology. In 2017 he published two books of essay on Utopia, by Thomas Mores (500 Years of Utopia and Two Essays on Utopia). O que interrogar hoje Machado de Assis? |
José Luís Jobim de Salles Fonseca is Full Professor of Literature at the Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil. He was President of the Brazilian Comparative Literature Association and Lemann Distinguished Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as well as Visiting Professor (Chaire des Amériques) at the University of Rennes. He is a Researcher and a member of the Board at the CNPq (National Research Council, Brazil) and a “Cientista do Nosso Estado” (Cientist of the State of Rio de Janeiro at FAPERJ - the State of Rio de Janeiro Research Foundation). |
Kenneth David Jackson is a Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Chair of the Council of Latin American and Iberian Studies at Yale University. He is the author of numerous scholarly publications, including Cannibal Angels: Transatlantic Modernism and the Brazilian Avant-Garde (Peter Lang, 2021), Adverse Genres in Fernando Pessoa (2010) and Machado de Assis: A Literary Life (2015), and he has co-edited collections such as Transformations of Literary Language in Latin American Literature 1960 (1996) and Haroldo de Campos: A Dialogue with the Brazilian Concrete Poet (2005). His co- translations include Oswald de Andrade’s Seraphim Grosse Pointe (1979) and Patrícia Galvão’s Industrial Park (1993). Citation and Reference in the Early Novels |
Paul Dixon (PhD from the University of North Carolina, 1981) has been teaching Latin American literature (Hispano-American and Brazilian) at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA, for 44 years. In the United States, he published two books: Reversible Readings (Univ. of Alabama Press, 1985), which studies the ambiguity of Dom Casmurro, and Retired Dreams (Purdue Univ. Press, 1989), which analyzes the transformations of the myth in Dom Casmurro. In Brazil, he published Os contos de Machado de Assis (Movimento, 1992), O chocalho de Brás Cubas (Nankin / EDUSP, 2009), and Por linhas tortas: análise de Quincas Borba (Nankin, 2020). Another book about the stories and the 'Instinct of nationality' is in press. The Hideous Gaze |
Regina Zilberman earned her degree in Letters from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (1970) and her doctorate in Romance Studies from the University of Heidelberg (Ruprecht-Karls) (1976), with postdoctoral research at University College, England (1980–1981), and Brown University, USA (1986–1987). She holds an honorary doctorate from the Federal University of Santa Maria. She is a permanent faculty member in the Graduate Program in Letters at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, an Emeritus Visiting Researcher (PVE) at Faperj, affiliated with the Graduate Program in Literary Studies at the Fluminense Federal University, and a permanent faculty member in the Graduate Program in Letters at the State University of Maranhão. Machado de Assis personagem – A life in literature |
Rogério Lima is a Full Professor at the University of Brasília, former president of the Brazilian Comparative Literature Association (2018-2019), and a CNPq and FAPERJ (2021-2022) researcher in Brazil. His most recent publications in journals and books include: "En la urgencia del tiempo presente me alegra saber que estás bien"; "Gilberto Freyre et le modernisme: anarchie et paradoxe"; "Literature And (Im)migration In Brazil" and "Mobilidades linguístico-culturais: reflexões epistêmicas para o ensino" (2022); "Comparative critical thinking in contemporary Brazil" (2018). Portraits of the Soul: The Role of Photography in Machado de Assis's Narrative Construction |
Sarah Burnautzki is Professor of French, Spanish, and Portuguese Literature at the University of Heide lberg. She completed her doctorate in French Literature and Social Anthropology at the University of Heidelberg and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Her monograph Les Frontières racialisées de la littérature française. Contrôle au faciès et stratégies de passage, published by Honoré Champion in 2017, examines the symbolic violence of racialization in French literature. Her research focuses on postcolonial theory, sociological theories of literature, and literatures of the African diaspora. A second monograph, on the poetry of Machado de Assis, is currently in preparation. Exercícios de abjeção: o Vínculo de Schwarz com a Pesquia Alemã Sobre Baudelaire e a sua Importância para sua Interpretação de Machado |
Sonia Netto Salomão, Sonia Netto Salomão, Senior Full Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Language and Translation at Sapienza University of Rome, is a researcher and former director of the Antônio Vieira Chair – Sapienza / Instituto Camões, honorary member and former president of the Italian Association for Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, among other roles. Among her numerous works are: Machado de Assis: dal “Morro do Livramento” alla Città delle Lettere (Viterbo, 2007, with reprints), Machado de Assis e il canone occidentale: poetica, contesto, fortuna (Carocci, 2023), which received awards in Italy and, in Brazil, the Jabuti Prize, and Machado de Assis, a complexidade de um clássico (Sapienza University Press, 2024). O "Memorial de Aires" entre o circunstancial e o eterno: máscaras machadianas |
Válmi Hatje-Faggion is a Full Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Brasília, Brazil, where she works in the Department of Foreign Languages and Translation. She teaches courses in translation theory and practice at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels (POSTRAD) in Translation Studies. Publications include Destino internacional: Machado de Assis para a língua inglesa - seis romances em múltiplas traduções, Tradução e Cultura (co-authored), and book chapters and articles in Brazil and abroad on criticism, reception and history of translation and the activities of translators and publishers. Translating Memorial de Aires by Machado de Assis into German and English: The Paratexts |
Yomi Folaranmi was born in Nigeria. He has his BA and MA in Comparative Literature from University College London and is currently studying for an MSc in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology at the University of Oxford. He will begin working towards a PhD in Art History at Harvard University in the autumn of 2025. He is broadly interested in interdisciplinary and hybrid approaches to global and postcolonial modernisms. The Humourist and the Pyrrhonist: Posthumous narration as ironic conceit in Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas and Il Fu Mattia Pascal |