Professor Else Vieira, PhD
Professor Emerita of Brazilian and Comparative Latin American Studies
Email: e.vieira@qmul.ac.uk
Profile
Else R P Vieira had a previous career at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. After visiting professorships in Oxford and Nottingham, she came to Queen Mary (2002) where she has introduced Brazilian Cultural Studies and Brazilian Cinema. She has also taught modules on Latin American Film and History. Postcolonial theory underlies her modules on Lusophone African cultures (Angola, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau). She has also taught the MA module "Sighting Gender and Sexuality in Latin American Film". Her comparative bias is reflected in her AHRC-funded research project "Screening Exclusion: Brazilian and Argentine Documentary Film-Making", which compares the 21st century boom of the documentary in these two countries. Her book "City of God in Several Voices: Brazilian Social Cinema as Action" (2005), conceived on the occasion of the visit of the actors of the film "City of God" to Queen Mary, reflects one of her major research interests: the expressions of minorities. A previous project focused on the politicization of the expression of the dispossessed; the resulting database, "Landless Voices", presently hosted by Queen Mary University of London (www.landless-voices.org), comprises a first-hand organization of the expressions of the landless rural workers in Brazil (over 20 million people) across several media as well as reference material. Her recent bilingual anthology "Poetas à deriva"/"Poets Adrift" (2013) articulates the expression of six Brazilian writers abroad, an unprecedented phenomenon in Brazilian history.This initial research later developed into a major binational project "Entre-lugares da literatura da diáspora brasileira"/"In between spaces of the Literature of the Brazilian Diaspora" [http://pelomundobrasil.blogspot.com.br/], which she convened integrating Queen Mary and the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (Brazil), funded by CAPES (Brazilian Ministry of Education). See "Brazilian Writers Abroad: Cartography and Quantitative Analysis" [http://zip.net/bpncyH] She has co-directed, with Dr. Maria Clara Castellões de Oliveira, a joint international research and publication project "˜Brazil and its Translators", on the cultural impact of the continuity, intensity and pervasiveness of the phenomenon of the Brazilian creative writer cum translator of literary texts. Eduardo Luís Araújo Batista (Research Assistant at Queen Mary, funded by the Brazilian Ministry of Education) has focused on the asymmetry of the reverse trajectory with a focus on Sir Richard Burton. Another binational project, "Gender and Work in Brazilian Migration", funded by Brazil's National Research Council) was co-directed by Professor Graciela Ravetti (Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil) with the participation of the Federal University of Juiz de Fora through Dr. Ana Beatriz Gonçalves.