Dr Ana Claudia Suriani da Silva

Associate Professor in Brazilian Studies

SELCS

Faculty of Arts & Humanities

Joined UCL: 1st Sep 2014

Research summary

My MA dissertation was a genetic and critical edition of Machado de Assis’s short story “Linha reta e linha curva” (Editora da UNICAMP, 2003). My PhD thesis was a study of the two versions of Machado de Assis’ Quincas Borba (Legenda, 2010 and NVerso, 2015). Other publications on Machado de Assis include the bilingual edition of Victor Heneaux’s Queda que as mulheres têm para os tolos (Editora da UNICAMP, 2008), the article “Esaú e Jacob e Memorial de Ayres: manuscritos que viajam” (Machado de Assis em Linha, 2019), and the book chapter “Capitu against the Elegiac Narrator”, in Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Brazilian Novel (2020).

I have been involved in several collaborative research projects. From 2008 to 2017, I was a member of the CNPq research network “Intertextual Relations in the Works of Machado de Assis”. As co-investigator for the international research network “The Transatlantic Circulation of Printed Matter: the Globalisation of Culture in the 19th Century” (FAPESP, 2011-2015), I explored the formation and consolidation of the fashion press as an international journalistic enterprise and the birth of the Brazilian fashion press. I published my findings in, among others, the volumes that I co-edited Books and Periodicals in Brazil 1768-1930: A Transatlantic Perspective (2014) and Cultural Revolution of the Nineteenth Century: Theatre, the Book-Trade and Reading in the Transatlantic World (2016). As a member of the international research network “Translation and Travel in Literary and Cultural Studies (2012-2014), I investigated how Hipólito da Costa adapted the format of the English review to found the periodical Correio Braziliense. My findings were published in the chapter “Hipólito da Costa, the Correio Braziliense and the dissemination of the Enlightenment in Brazil”, in The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London: Politics from a Distance (co-authored with Isabel Lustosa, 2017).

Currently, I coordinate with Claudia Oliveira (UFRJ) the research group “Women in the Brazilian Press” of the CNPq research network “The Role of the Periodicals in the Circulation of Ideas in the 19th and 20th Centuries”. We organised and co-authored the presentation of the special issue “Moda, Mulher e Imprensa no Brasil”, dObra[s] (2020). Other special issues on the field of fashion studies that I have edited are “Brazilian Fashion” for Film Fashion & Consumption (2013) and “Machado de Assis e a Moda” for Machado de Assis em Linha (2017).

As part of the research project “Women in the Brazilian Press”, I am working with a team of students and academics of UNICAMP and UNESP on the digital edition of the collaboration of Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho, Délia, and Júlia Lopes de Almeida with the Rio de Janeiro press.

Teaching summary

I teach PORT0001 Portuguese for Beginners, PORT0004 The Brazilian Novel, PORT0007 Brazilian Fiction into Film and PORT0010 Short Fiction in the Making of Brazil. I contribute to the MA in Translation Studies by teaching PORT0011 Translation from and into Portuguese and the MA in Comparative Literature with a Genetic Criticism seminar (CMII0019 Modern Literary Theory).

I welcome MA and PhD proposals on Lusophone literature, comparative literature, book history and translation studies.

Education

University College London: Other Postgraduate qualification (including professional), ATQ03 - Recognised by the HEA as a Fellow | 2018

Biography

I was educated in Brazil, Switzerland and England, where I studied Lusophone, French and Comparative Literature. My BA is in Portuguese (UNICAMP, 1995) and MPhil in Literary Theory and History (UNICAMP, 1997). I was an undergraduate student at the University of Geneva for one year (1996) and started my PhD under the supervision of Prof. Wlad Godzich. After taking a career break when my first son was born, I moved to Oxford and completed an MA in European Literature (2003) and DPhil in Brazilian Literature (2007). I have lived in different parts of Brazil as a child and in the United States as a high school student.

I joined UCL in 2014 to help develop the Brazilian Studies programme. Before joining UCL, I taught at the University of Surrey, Birkbeck College, the University of Oxford, and the University of Birmingham. I held visiting professorships and research fellowships at Institut des Textes et Modernes, UNICAMP, Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa, and Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora.

My interest in editorial practices, literature, press history, and translation has oriented my teaching, research, and public engagement activities over the years. I work on Brazilian literature, book and press histories, focusing on Machado de Assis’s works, prose fiction, 19th-century press, and fashion history. I am particularly interested in the relationship between the creative processes of a text, its genre and means of publication, and in the circulation of ideas between Europe and Brazil through the press. I am currently working on the collaboration of women writers with the Brazilian press during the Belle Époque.

My publications to date include one monograph, three scholarly editions, four co-edited volumes, two co-edited special issues, and several journal articles and book chapters. I am the recipient of the Brazilian Foreign Ministry International Award for best essays on Machado de Assis (2006), and I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

I was one of the convenors of the SELCS’s pioneering public engagement and knowledge transfer initiative, Café Culture. I am the founding director of the SELCS Brazilian Translation Club.

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