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Dr Ana Carolina Sá Teles is a Visiting Research Fellow from 2 January to 31 December 2025.
Ana Carolina Sá Teles is a Collaborative Researcher at the Institute of Language Studies at the State University of Campinas. Her research explores new literature and gender in the collection He and She by the Brazilian writer Júlia Lopes de Almeida, taking into account the constitutive link between literature and the press in the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century. She holds a PhD from the Faculty of Philosophy, Languages and Human Sciences at the University of São Paulo, focusing on character constellations in the nineteenth-century novels by the Rio de Janeiro writer Machado de Assis. Her latest articles include ‘From Crônica to Novel: Russo-Turkish Wars in Machado de Assis’ Fortnightly History and Dom Casmurro’ (Em Tese) and ‘Resurrection and Measure for Measure: The Irony in Intertextuality’ (Machado de Assis em Linha). Her research is funded by the São Paulo Research Foundation.
Project Description
Dr Teles investigates the ‘Woman Question’ in works by women writers who contributed to the press in the latter half of the nineteenth century, as well as in a selection of feminist discourses in the London periodicals English Woman’s Journal (1858-1864) and Victoria Magazine (1863-1880). The research specifically addresses Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, Saccharrissa’s letters by George Eliot in the Pall Mall Gazette, and Virginia Woolf’s essays that critique nineteenth-century women writers.
The project retrieves the fact that the main circulation of British print culture in nineteenth-century Brazil was supported by the Rio de Janeiro British Subscription Library between 1826 and 1892, and that one of its most important aspects (when compared with other libraries in Rio at the time) was the larger presence of books by women writers. The collection included Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Margareth Oliphant, and Frances Trollope, among other authors.
Thus, Dr Teles’ work at the IAS/UCL broadens her postdoctoral research at IEL/UNICAMP by enlightening the debate on gender roles in the nineteenth-century British literature and press in a comparative perspective with the Latin American cultural milieu. Her inquiry concerns how the cultural phenomenon of the ‘Woman Question’ in the Victorian era was perceived by women writers in Brazil during their formative years, culminating in the vindication of feminist rights at the turn of the century, as observed in Júlia Lopes de Almeida’s writings.
