Carolina Sá Carvalho
Assistant Professor, Department of Spanish & Portuguese
Carolina Sá Carvalho is an assistant professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. She received her PhD from Princeton University, and earned master’s degrees at both Princeton University and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where she also earned a bachelor’s degree. From 2015 to 2021, she was a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Sá Carvalho works on Latin American literatures and visual culture with a focus on 19th- and 20th-century Brazil, critical theory, media theory, environmental humanities, imperialism and the relationships between aesthetics and politics. Her articles and essays have examined a range of topics, including realism, photography, humanitarianism and infrastructure. She is currently working on a book-length project on mosquitoes and the aesthetics and politics of contagion in 20th-century Brazil.
Her forthcoming first book, Traces of the Unseen: Photography, Violence, and Modernization in Early Twentieth-Century Latin America (Northwestern University Press) examines the role of photography as visual evidence of the destructive processes of extractive capitalist expansion in regions such as the Amazon and the Brazilian sertão.
Discussing her work, Sá Carvalho says: “Working on literary and visual studies allows me to work at the intersection of many disciplines as well as across borders. My work has taken me to archives in medical, ethnographic and art institutions around the world. I also love to incorporate this interdisciplinary and transnational perspective in the classroom. Focusing on the study of Brazilian visual and literary traditions in a global context helps a diverse array of students to engage with primary materials while elaborating their own questions and interests.” This year, Sá Carvalho looks forward to teaching two new courses dealing with disease and the environment.