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Dr Ana Claudia Suriani da Silva
Senior Lecturer
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”, published by Editora da UNICAMP in 2003. My PhD thesis was a study of the two versions of Machado de Assis’ Quincas Borba. It was published by Legenda (2010) and NVerso (2015). Other publications on the works and translations by 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 (UCL Press, 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 (Legenda, 2014) and Cultural Revolution of the Nineteenth Century: Theatre, the Book-Trade and Reading in the Transatlantic World (I. B. Tauris, 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, Bloomsbury, 2017).
Currently, I coordinate 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”. Our first outputs will be published in the special issue “Moda, Mulher e Imprensa no Brasil”, dObra[s] in August 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).
Teaching summary
I teach PORT0001 Portuguese for Beginners, PORT0004 The Brazilian Novel, PORT0007 20th-Century Brazilian Literature 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 to the MA in Comparative Literature with a seminar on Genetic Criticism (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.
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 the works of Machado de Assis, 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 am jointly responsible for the running of the Brazilian Translation Club, a series of workshops in which students, translators, and enthusiasts of Brazilian literature meet to discuss the translation of a selected contemporary Brazilian short story.