.Lígia Bezerra
Associate Professor of Portuguese Arizona State University

I was born in Várzea Alegre, Ceará, Brazil and moved to the United States in 2006, where I completed a master’s in Portuguese at the University of New Mexico and a doctorate in Portuguese with a minor in cultural studies at Indiana University. I also hold a master’s in linguistics from Universidade Federal do Ceará. I taught Portuguese and English language and linguistics in Brazil and have taught Portuguese and Spanish language, Lusophone literature and culture, and Latin American literature and culture in the United States. My research interests include consumption, everyday life, neoliberalism, and democracy. I have published articles in journals such as Chasqui, Journal of Lusophone Studies, Estudos de Literatura Brasileira Contemporânea, Luso-Brazilian Review, and Cultural Studies. My book, Everyday Consumption in Twenty-First-Century Brazilian Fiction (Purdue University Press, 2022), is the first in-depth study to map out the representation of consumption in contemporary Brazilian prose, highlighting how our interactions with commodities connect seemingly disconnected areas of everyday life, such as eating habits, the growth of prosperity theology, and ideas of success and failure. I am writing a second book, which focuses on how Brazilian Popular Music articulates resistance to anti-democratic forces in the twenty-first century. Through my research, I started participating in BRASA conferences when I was a graduate student and am grateful for all the opportunities the association’s conference has afforded me as I have advanced in my career. As a member of BRASA’s executive committee, I would be honored to contribute to the association’s mission, helping to build community and to continue to open doors for future generations of scholars in the area of Brazilian Studies

Ben Cowan
Professor of History
University of California, San Diego

Ben Cowan received his B.A. from Harvard University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from UCLA. He has written extensively on right-wing radicalism, morality, sexuality, and authoritarianism in Cold War Brazil, specializing in the cultural and gender history of the post-1964 era. He has written two award-winning books on these topics: Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil (UNC, 2016) and Moral Majorities Across the Americas: Brazil, the United States, and the Creation of the Religious Right (UNC, 2021). He is currently carrying out research for a third project, which focuses on Brazil as a locus for foregrounding South-centered histories of mountaineering and outdoor recreation.
Ben is a staunch advocate of interdisciplinarity as a core aspect of BRASA’s mission and modus operandi. As a BRASA member, he advocates for the visibility of Brazil and Brazilian Studies, especially when it comes to scholarship on gender, sexuality, women, blackness, and other vectors of marginalization and exclusion. On the Executive Committee, Ben would be committed to fostering interdisciplinary dialogues on the critical issues of our moment, especially the rise of fascism, far-right extremism, and the transnational crisis of democracy.  

Leonora Souza Paula
Assistant Professor, Literary Studies and Latin American Studies
Michigan State University

As an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University, I specialize in Literary Studies and Latin American Studies, with a focus on intersections of race, gender, urban culture, and memory in contemporary Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Diasporic culture. My current research examines the role of Black feminist spatial imagination in claiming literature and culture as heritage recovery and epistemic reparation. This work informs my broader commitment to digital archiving, community engagement, and transnational advocacy.
I co-founded the AfroFutures Now Digital Archive, a multilingual platform that curates Black women’s intellectual histories and was featured at the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent in 2025. My global engagement includes invited participation in high-level United Nations forums, including the Summit of the Future and multiple sessions of the Permanent Forum. My public scholarship has reached international audiences through GWL Voices, Geledés, and the Washington Brazil Office, amplifying Afro-Brazilian feminist perspectives in global policy dialogues.
My work has been recognized with the ACLS Fellowship, Vital Voices Visionaries Fellowship, and multiple institutional awards for excellence in diversity, equity, and community engagement, including Michigan State University’s Excellence in DEI Award and the Inspiration Award from the Center for Gender in Global Context.
I have published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes, and I actively curate panels and conferences that foreground decolonial methodologies and Afro-Brazilian feminist thought. As a BRASA member, I am committed to fostering inclusive, community-engaged scholarship and supporting emerging scholars. I would be honored to contribute to BRASA’s mission by amplifying historically marginalized voices and cultivating global dialogue.

Tassiana Moura de Oliveira
Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science
SUNY, Albany

I am a Visiting Assistant Professor of Public Law at the University at Albany (SUNY), where my research focuses on how courts shape social policies in Brazil. My academic journey was all based in Brazil and deeply connected to questions of inequality, democracy, and representation. I first became involved with BRASA during its San Diego edition, a period that coincided with my move to the United States. Since then, BRASA has represented for me a crucial bridge between scholars in Brazil and those who study Brazil abroad.
As a Brazilian scholar living and working in the United States, I am deeply aware of the challenges faced by Brazilians navigating U.S. academia, especially those from underrepresented regions and racial backgrounds. Since 2021, I have been involved in the project Negritude no PhD, which mentors Afro-Brazilian students in preparing applications for Ph.D. programs in the United States. This initiative reflects my broader commitment to making academic spaces more inclusive and accessible to Brazilian scholars of all backgrounds.
I am also one of the directors of the Kilomba Collective, a network of nearly one thousand Black Brazilian women living in the U.S. and Canada. Through this work, I have helped foster collaboration, mutual support, and visibility for Brazilian women across disciplines and regions.
As a Black woman from Recife, in Brazil’s Northeast, I bring perspectives and experiences that remain underrepresented in many academic and institutional spaces. Serving on BRASA’s Executive Committee would allow me to contribute to the organization’s mission of inclusion, ensuring that voices like mine, outside the traditional São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Salvador circuits, are heard and represented in the future of Brazilian studies. I would also be thrilled to help plan upcoming BRASA events, always seeking creative ways to bring more Brazilians to the front row of discussions about Brazil

Victoria Saramago
Associate Professor of Brazilian Literature
University of Chicago

Victoria Saramago is associate professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. She holds a PhD in Iberian and Latin American Cultures from Stanford University and an MA in Luso-Brazilian Literature and Portuguese Language from the State University of Rio de Janeiro. Her research covers twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American literature, with a focus on Brazil. It works in the intersection of ecocriticism and fiction theory, with a special focus on representations of forests and rural areas in Latin America, Luso-Hispanic dialogue, environmental and energy humanities, and fiction theories. Her most recent book, Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America (Northwestern UP, 2021), investigates the dynamic relationship between fictional images and real places, as the lasting representations of forests, rural areas, and deserts in novels that clash with collective perceptions of changes such as deforestation and urbanization. She has co-edited The Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics (De Gruyter, 2023) and Literature Beyond the Human: Post-Anthropocentric Brazil (Routledge, 2022). She is also the co-editor of two special issues: O Antropoceno na perspectiva da análise histórica (Topoi: Revista de História, 2023) and Narratives of the Apocalypse (Journal of Lusophone Studies, 2022). She has received a year-long fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to complete her current book project, which examines the role of electricity in Brazilian cultural production and is under contract with MIT Press.

Paula Silva
Professor
Department of Sociology – Universidade Federal da Bahia

I have great admiration for the proposal of the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA) and have already participated in several editions of the congresses, either presenting papers or in Roundtables. The themes I have addressed in these Congresses express well what my academic and intellectual production has been, dealing with racism and affirmative action (2004, Rio de Janeiro; 2010, Brasília), student and faculty mobility in cooperation projects between Brazil and the United States (2006, Nashville, where I also completed my post-doctoral studies), gender and intersectionality (2014, London; 2016, Providence; 2018, Rio de Janeiro), and female leadership in Capoeira Angola (2008, New Orleans). In these last three Congresses, my participation took place in Roundtables. In New Orleans, I acted as Coordinator, and the Roundtable was followed by a capoeira circle with the participation of many women, including the presenters. I am a Full Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Federal University of Bahia and have extensive experience in institutional work at the Brazilian Sociological Society, where I coordinated the Research Committee on the Sociology of Ethnic-Racial Relations from 2013 to 2025, and was part of the board in the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 terms. I am certain that at this point in my career, I can contribute significantly to the Brazilian Studies Association based on these previous experiences in institutional work and the transnational networks I have built, especially with colleagues from Brazil and the United States, but also from other countries in the Global South. My work as an anti-racist and feminist activist, and founder of the Nzinga Capoeira Angola Group, which has been in existence for 30 years, will also enrich my work at the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA).

Sheyla Castro Diniz
Researcher and Collaborating Professor
Department of History at FFLCH/USP

I am a Professor and collaborating Researcher in the Department of History at FFLCH/USP, where I recently completed, with a FAPESP scholarship, the postdoctoral project “Metá Metá: sociocultural knowledge through contemporary song”. A sociologist and musician, with a master’s and doctorate from Unicamp, I conduct research on Brazilian popular music from the 1960s to the present, with an emphasis on the relationships between recorded music, politics, modernism, youth, experimentalism, and the Afro-diaspora. I was a visiting researcher at the Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (France, 2013-2014) and at Tulane University (USA, 2024-2025). Among other works, I am the author of the book “De Tudo que a Gente Sonhou: Amigos e Canções do Clube da Esquina” (Intermeios/Fapesp, 2017) and the thesis “Desbundados e Marginais: MPB e Contracultura nos Anos de Chumbo (1969–1974)”, currently under review for publication. At USP, I work on consolidating the research line “Sociology of Music” and coordinate the extension project “Seminars on Listening and Studies in Popular Music”.
As a member of BRASA since 2012, I have been able to establish dialogues with researchers from various countries, participate in qualified debates about contemporary Brazil, improve my research, and internationalize its results. The international circulation and visibility that BRASA congresses provide have brought important gains to my academic career, which motivates my candidacy for the Executive Committee, in order to reciprocate and contribute to initiatives that strengthen the Association’s objectives. I will seek to promote artistic and cultural activities at the biennial congresses; To stimulate funding opportunities for the participation of Brazilian graduate students and researchers; to encourage the involvement of activist intellectuals in order to bridge theory and social practice; to value racial and gender diversity; to assist with bureaucratic tasks; and to expand dissemination channels.
I will participate in the congress in Salvador (2026), and I am excited about the possibility of joining the BRASA Executive Committee to work on these proposals and collaborate in the organization of the 2028 and 2030 congresses.