Contributors

Mauricio Acuña is a Mellon Faculty Fellow at Dartmouth College. He is a scholar of Afro-Latin American Studies, specializing in contemporary literatures and cultures of the African Diaspora in the Americas, with a special focus on Brazil. His research interests include the poetics, performances, and aesthetics of Afro-diasporic artists and intellectuals, race relations, and digital humanities. Mauricio is writing a book exploring how Afro-Latin American artists and writers shaped aesthetic creations, anti-racist politics, and the rise of Black Internationalism in the South Atlantic between 1950–1970. His first book, A ginga da nação: intelectuais na capoeira e capoeiristas intelectuais, discussed how marginalized capoeira practitioners legitimized and promoted their art, sport, and knowledge.

Matthew P. Johnson is an energy and environmental historian, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment. His forthcoming book Hydropower in Authoritarian Brazil: An Environmental History of Low-Carbon Energy, 1960s–90s (Cambridge University Press) tells the story of the Brazilian military regime’s nationwide dam building campaign, and its attendant social and environmental consequences. He is currently researching and writing a second book about Caribbean oil refineries.

Amartya Karmakar is currently a first-year PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in English Language and Literatures from India. His research interests include film theory and criticism, feminist theory, gender, and masculinity studies.

Eugenio Lucotti is a PhD student at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, from which he received a Master’s in European, American, and Postcolonial Languages and Literatures in 2018. His MA thesis was on Mário de Andrade’s novel Amar, verbo intransitivo, about which he has also published two articles. His research area is modern and contemporary Lusophone literature, and he will defend his PhD thesis on Augusto Abelaira’s work in Spring 2023 as part of a cotutelle program with the University of Lisbon.

Frans Weiser is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Latin American Studies at the University of Georgia. His book False Documents: Inter-American Cultural History, Literature and the Lost Decade (1975–1992) (2020) comparatively analyzes historical fiction to resituate the critical nationalism of writers/journalists from Brazil, Hispanic America, and the United States in conjunction with the rise of cultural history paradigms. His current research project documents the systemic, though underexplored, role of literary adaptation in twenty-first century Brazilian crime cinema.