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João Cezar de Castro Rocha named Visiting Endowed Chair Professor in Luso-Brazilian Studies

 

September 9, 2009 — Dartmouth, MA. The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Department of Portuguese, in partnership with the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, announces the hire of Prof. João Cezar de Castro Rocha of the University of Manchester, England, for Fall Semester 2009. Prof. Castro Rocha will teach a one-semester research seminar entitled “Anthropophagy and Transculturation: Forms of Transatlantic Author(ship) and Appropriation” in the Department of Portuguese, under the auspices of the Hélio and Amélia Pedroso/Luso-American Foundation Endowed Chair in Portuguese Studies.

The course will propose a comparative study of the writers Fernando Ortiz and Oswald de Andrade. This comparison intends to develop a theoretical framework to reread the works of Machado de Assis and Eça de Queirós, the two major authors of the Portuguese language in the 19^th century. This once-a-week seminar, taught in Portuguese, meets on Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m. until December.

João Cezar de Castro Rocha is Professor of Comparative Transatlantic Studies at the University of Manchester, where he has also also been Director of the Institute for Transnational Studies and Director of the MA in Latin American Cultural Studies. He is author of several books, including /Literatura e cordialidade/: /o público e o privado na cultura brasileira/, that received the Mário de Andrade Award from the National Library of Brazil. He is also the co-author of /Evolution and Conversion /(Continuum, 2008), with René Girard and Pierpaolo Antonello, which was awarded the prestigious Prix Aujourd'hui for 2004. He is the editor of more than 20 books, including two published by the UMD Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture. He has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellowship at the University of Berlin; the Tinker Visiting Professor at the University of Wisconsin, the “Ministry of Culture Visiting Fellow” at the University of Oxford; the “Overseas Visiting Scholar,” at the Cambridge University; and the John D. and Rose H. Jackson Fellowship, at the Yale University.

Established in 2001 by the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, the Hélio and Amélia Pedroso/Luso-American Foundation Endowed Chair in Portuguese Studies allows for the yearly hire of a distinguished scholar and professor, specializing in the vast and varied Portuguese-speaking world comprised of over 220 million people in eight countries on four continents.