Date/Time
Date(s) - 01/21/2021
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Category(ies)
Our first colloquium of Winter 2021 will feature Rex Nielson, Associate Professor of Spanish & Portuguese on Thursday January 21st at 3:00 pm via Zoom. This presentation will introduce an anthologizing and translation project focused on the theme of nature and the environmental imaginary in Brazilian thought and culture. This anthology in English translation constitutes a critical intervention into the burgeoning fields of ecocriticism and environmental humanities by framing and considering ways in which nature and the environment feature in Brazil’s intellectual and cultural history. Additionally, this project will make available to an English-speaking audience for the first time a wide variety of texts, including letters, essays, poems, and short stories, that represent concepts, problems, and polemics particular to Brazil’s rich socio-biodiversity. The selection is wide-ranging, spanning genres, periods, regions, themes, and positionalities. Organized around Brazil’s major biomes and featuring Afro-Brazilian, Indigenous, and women writers along with canonical Luso-Brazilian figures, this anthology will both deepen and challenge Anglophone readers’ appreciation and understanding of the environment in Brazil, confirming yet moving beyond tropes of marvelous natural abundance and catastrophic destruction and figuring Brazil not just as an object of environmental concern but also as a vital locus of environmental thinking.
A unique aspect of this project is the mentored-learning environment involving teams of undergraduate students in the process of translating, editing, annotating, and researching relevant historical, cultural, and scientific contexts for each of the selected texts. The presentation will address the following: 1) the need for an English-language anthology of Brazilian environmental literature; 2) the rationale for the selections and organization of texts and translation methodologies; 3) why undergraduate students have been involved and how their contributions have shaped the project.
Title: Anthologizing Brazilian Nature: An Anthology and Undergraduate Mentored Learning Experiment
We hope you’ll join us for this week’s colloquium on Zoom: https://byu.zoom.us/j/99606990110
