Corrêa de Sá, André

Bio:

I am an Associate Professor in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I have wide-ranging interdisciplinary interests in literatures and cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world and work within a postcolonial and transnational framework (Portugal, Brazil and Lusophone Africa). Focusing primarily on authors from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, I have written on topics such as psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, romanticism and modernism, colonialism, post-colonialism, and, more recently, environmental humanities.

My current core project is a book tentatively entitled Songs for a brutal world: ecology and solidarity in Lusophone literature. Under the banner of environmental criticism and spanning Lusophone fiction and poetry from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, the overall goal of this book is to rethink reading practices by focusing on the way literature evokes the affective, aesthetic and political connections with the environment. My purpose is to urge a revaluation of these texts by showing how literature may improve our connection to the environment. In doing so, I try to bear the idea that literature has an important and long-lasting role in promoting a sense of sustainability and ecological responsibility we should rely upon.

Prior to joining UCSB I taught at the Federal University of São Carlos, São Paulo, Brazil. I teach undergraduate courses in Portuguese and Lusophone African Studies and graduate courses on the relations between literature and environment. I also contribute to the Center for Portuguese Studies at UCSB, which seeks to foster the study of the literatures, language and cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world in the US.