Dr Lucas Amaral de Oliveira

Contested Histories of Nation-Building: Counternarratives in Contemporary Brazilian Literature

This proposal departs from the sociology of literature and decolonial theory to understand how contemporary Black Brazilian authors are engaging with established narratives of nation-building by contesting social fictions regarding racial democracy, miscegenation, and cordiality. Based in the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), under the guidance of mentors from the Modern Languages Core Disciplinary Research Group, the Fellowship will accelerate the research and enable the mutually beneficial sharing of expertise. The project has strong potential to lead to longer-term collaboration between the applicant’s home institution, Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), in Brazil, and QUB, in the UK. The Fellowship will also provide opportunities for the lead applicant to present his work-in-progress to international peers and produce a paper to be submitted to a high-quality journal, activities that will underpin a manuscript that the applicant is preparing on the discursive dimensions of nation-building in Brazil.