Luiza Franco Moreira

Professor of Comparative Literature     Chair

Curriculum Vitae

Luiza Franco Moreira, professor of Comparative Literature and chair of the department, holds a PhD. in comparative literature from Cornell University (1992) and a Master's in literary theory com distinção e louvor from the University of São Paulo, in Brazil (1983).  She received a BA in philosophy from the University of São Paulo, where she also studied Portuguese and Brazilian literatures as an undergraduate.  Moreira joined the faculty of comparative literature at Binghamton as Associate Professor in 2001; she had previously held the position of Assistant Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian literature at U.C. Berkeley (1992-1995) and Princeton (1995-2001).  She has held visiting positions at the University of São Paulo and Cornell.

Moreira's scholarship is concerned with literary history, in particular with problems of contextualization. From a substantive point of view, she focuses mostly on Brazilian Modernism (or Modernismo), an influential and innovative literary and artistic movement that developed from the 1920s through the mid-twentieth century. In the late thirties and early forties, the Modernist poets were publishing the work for which they are best remembered today, but they also engaged in diverse ways with the cultural and political life of the dictatorship led by Getúlio Vargas, the Estado Novo (1937-45). Moreira's first book, Meninos, poetas e heróis (Children, Poets and Heroes) discusses the poetry, political prose, and journalism of one of the writers of the period, Cassiano Ricardo (1895-1974), a vocal supporter of Vargas'. She subsequently edited an anthology of his poetry. Moreira's recent scholarship focuses on intellectual dissent during the Vargas dictatorship. Here, as in the earlier books, she is concerned with drawing from the perspectives of literary scholars and historians in order to fashion an approach that will bring to light the literary and political complexity of the texts under discussion. Moreira is a poet and literary translator as well.

Sample recent publications:

"Songs and Intellectuals: The Musical Projects of Alain Locke, Alejo Carpentier, and Mario de Andrade," in Comparative Literature Studies, 49.2 (2012).

"Frente conjectural: escritores brasileños de izquierda y el Estado Novo," Revista de Indias, 249 (2010) II.

"Ensaio e Ciência: contextos e subentendidos de 'Os parceiros do Rio Bonito' de Antonio Candido, Conexão Letras, v. 10, n. 13 (2015) 33-42.

"The aftermath of Abolition: Distortions of the Historical Record in Machado de Assis' Counselor Ayres' Memorial," Second Slaveries and the Atlantization of the Americas, ed. Javier Laviña and Michael Zeuske. Münster: LIT Verlag, 2013.