Graduate
The Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese offers both Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in Portuguese with emphasis on Brazilian and Portuguese literatures and cultures. Our faculty research interests and teaching include 19th and 20th century Luso-Brazilian literatures and contemporary Brazilian cinema and music. Both in our teaching and research we promote the study of culture, its manifestations, and especially its representations in an interdisciplinary, comparative, and transnational fashion. Among the current areas of specializations are Contemporary Brazilian cinema, Afro-Brazilian Culture, Brazilian Cultural and Intellectual History, Brazilian Modernism, Brazilian Popular Music, Fiction and History, Culture under Authoritarianism, The city and the sertão in literature and film, ethnic Brazilian literatures (including Jewish) and representations of (im)migrants in literature and film, the colonial period in literature and film, and Brazilian female authors. We are also one of a handful of institutions in the United States to investigate the cultural production of Brazilian-Americans and Brazilian immigration to the United States. The department does not offer a Portuguese linguistics track, although some of our faculty, affiliated faculty, and graduate students currently study topics such as Portuguese as a heritage or second language or Amerindian languages such as Tupi-Guarani.
Our graduate students are encouraged to study Brazilian literature, cinema and music in a comparative vein as well, paying attention to possible connections to broader contexts in the Portuguese-speaking world, Latin America, or the Americas. While deeply-rooted in Brazilian intellectual thought, graduate students in Portuguese are equally expected to participate in contemporary theoretical debates on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and power relations, as well as regarding national, transnational, and transcultural identities. Our students often take courses offered by the Programs in Comparative Literature and Gender and Women’s Study, and the Departments of Media and Cinema Studies, Anthropology, History, Sociology, Education, and the School of Music. Research by recent and current graduate students in Portuguese has included topics such as the Brazilian Modernismo, Afro-Brazilians in the work of Machado de Assis, the Tropicalist movement, noncompliant female characters, nineteenth-century Brazilian women writers, and road movies as a genre in Brazilian film.
Graduate students in Portuguese usually acquire substantial teaching experience during their tenure at Illinois. Supervised by a language coordinator, they are offered opportunities to teach all levels of Portuguese language and often a few topics courses. Many of our graduate students also receive fellowships from or administered by the University of Illinois such as the Lemann Graduate Fellowship, the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (for the study of Portuguese language), and the Tinker Fellowship. Teaching assistantships and fellowships such as these usually include a stipend and tuition and partial fee waivers. Some of our graduate students have recently earned tenure-track or lecturer positions at institutions such as Michigan State University, University of North Carolina at Wilmington, Charleston College, the University of Oregon and U Penn.