The Postgraduate Programs are organized in Lines of Research and, within each line, by Research Projects.
According to Capes (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel), agency that subsidizes the Ministry of Education in the formulation of post-graduation’s national politics:
- A Line of Research is defined as a dominion or thematic core of the Program’s research activity, which concludes the systemic development of works with common objectives or methodologies.
- A project is understood as a research activity, development or extension about a specific theme or object, with defined objectives, methodology and duration, and developed either individually by a researcher or, collectively by a research team.
- Literary Contacts
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Project: Rewriting in contemporary Irish literature
Description: Study of the transposition of Greek plays to the drama produced in Ireland in the last decades of the 20th century.
Professor in charge: Munira Hamud Mutran
Project: Trails of the English Novel in Brazil in the 19th century
Description: Study of the English novel in the 18th and 19th centuries for the formation and consolidation of the novel in Brazil, focused on the discussion of acclimatization of forms and procedures. It deals with the problem of literary forms importing and its local adaptation and transformation.
Professor in charge: Sandra Guardini Teixeira Vasconcelos
Project: North-American Theater and Comparative Dramaturgy
Description: Historical-critical study of Modern and Contemporary North-American dramaturgy from the point of view of its formal and theoretical characteristics and the relation between text and scenic constructions.
Professor in charge: Maria Silvia Betti
Project: North-American Theater: dramaturgy, groups and scenic conceptions (1968-1990)
Description: Analytical and critical study of dramaturgy, theater groups and the North-American scenic conceptions between the years of 1968 and 1990. The time period proposed marks two significant dates within the North-American context: 1968, year internationally known by political protests against the capitalist establishment, was particularly important due to the ascension of the counter-culture movement and due to its questioning of all established cultural and theatrical forms. The late 80s, on the other hand, mark the end of the Reagan era in the United States and represent an acceleration of the process of commodification of culture, with significant repercussion on the field of dramaturgy and scenic practices. The proposed project aims to deepen the analysis of the role of theater as an element of representation and reflection within this historical picture and, additionally, it will investigate the repercussion of the North-American Theater in the Brazilian context.
Professor in charge: Maria Silvia Betti
Project: Theoretical Travels
Description: Study of the critical theories in English language and their reception in Brazil.
Professor in charge: Maria Elisa Burgos Pereira da Silva Cevasco
- Translation Studies
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Project: The translation of poetic language
Description: This project analyzes elements of the translation of poetic language, the translation of formal elements such as meter, rhyme scheme, and the link between form and meaning. Besides dealing with poetry translation, it also deals with the poetic language found in works of prose such as James Joyce and plays by William Shakespeare.
Professor in charge: John Milton
Project: Dictionary of verbal collocations
Description: Collect combinations of verbs and nouns, that is, of verbal collocations for the production of a bilingual dictionary.
Professor in charge: Stella Esther Ortweiler Tagnin
Project: Political and social interfaces in literary translation and interpretation in Brazil
Description: This project analyzes, on the one hand, the interface between literary translation and interpretation, and on the other hand, Brazil’s history, politics, economy and social progress.
Professor in charge: John Milton
Project COMET: Multilingual Corpus for Teaching and Translation
Description: Project COMET consists of 3 corpora: CorTec (Technical Corpus), CoMAprend (Learners’ Corpus) and CorTrad (Translation Corpus). The current project foresees CorTec’s broadening with the addition of 10 new corpora, as well as the implementation of ComAprend with essays produced by students from both graduation and extension courses. Moreover, it foresees the implementation of a parallel corpus with essays in English and Portuguese from FAPESP’s Research Magazine as part of CorTrad.
Professor in charge: Stella Esther Ortweiler Tagnin
Project: Translation and Adaptation
Description: This project studies the connections between adaptation and translation, both in theoretical and practical terms.
Professor in charge: John Milton
Project: Translation and Ethics: cultural, political and ideological aspects
Description: The project focuses on the responsibilities involved in translation work, which are traditionally ignored in studies of the field. In the last years, translation studies have emphasised, in many ways, the fact that the translator is practically “invisible” in many cultures. This translator’s invisibility chimera has been rejected and, in its place, the translator that inevitably inscribes themselves in the texts produced emerges and, because of that, also has a portion of responsibility in their work’s effects. It will deal with issues such as translation of non-standard dialects, characters’ characterization through deviant language, the translator’s practice in different cultures literary communities, and effects of the translation on the literary production of the target language, as well as, writing practices that, at times, merge with translation (adaptations, rewritings etc.). In terms of the more concrete field of job market, it investigates issues of ethics and professional relationships, such as copyright of author and translator.
Professor in charge: Lenita Maria Rimoli Esteves
Project: The reception of Brazilian literature in the English language world
Description: The main objective of this research projects is to evaluate the reception of translated Brazilian literature in the English language world. Even though some researches and surveys have already been carried out about the reception of Brazilian literature abroad (which we will discuss in a later section), there is still a broad field to be researched. The projection that Brazil has gained worldwide is undeniable. Due to various social, economic and political reasons, Brazil has drawn attention from other nations, which also opens up more space worldwide for our cultural works, including literature. It aims to investigate who are the cultural agents responsible for the promoting of our literature in English-speaking countries and how this process takes place, which involves editors, authors, translators, university professors, government agencies and the mainstream press, among others.
Professor in charge: Lenita Maria Rimoli Esteves
- Culture Studies
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Project: Critical Literacy and Education in the World
Description: This project focus on the question about the concept of Critical Literacy, its current and possible characterizations for Applied Linguistics. It takes as its starting point the current context of globalization that results in flows, crossings, and cross-cultural encounters; these encounters approximate texts, languages, objects and people from different cultural and linguistic origins, and require careful and critical process of comprehension and mutual interpretation in order to avoid possible conflicts that may arise from the frantic circulation of values and differences. As such, this project represents a continuation and advancement of the results achieved in my previous projects: The Multimodal writing: writing as identity construction and my research project for teacher training Through Other Eyes.
Professor in charge: Lynn Mario Trindade Menezes de Souza
Project: Multiculturalism, transculturality and globalization in English-language cultures
Description: The project Multiculturalism and transculturality broads its focus on the study of minorities in the construction/representation of cultural identities through the literary text. The contemporary narratives are shaped beyond the nation-state limits and question the concepts of ethnicity, race, class and gender. The objective is to analyze the new poetics of space and time in the narratives that display a dynamic mutation relevant to a network society.
Professor in charge: Laura Patricia Zuntini de Izarra
Project: The Moment of Culture Studies
Description: Study of the ascension of the Culture Studies course and evaluation of some of its results.
Professor in charge: Maria Elisa Burgos Pereira da Silva Cevasco.
Project: Relations between literature and contemporary cinema in the USA.
Description: The project aims to establish relations between the North-American Left history and the literary and cinematographic production in the 20th century, with emphasis on the production starting in the 60s.
Professor in charge: Marcos César de Paula Soares
- Language, Education and Society
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Project: Interfaces between the verbal and non-verbal in multimodal discourses
Description: This research aims to investigate in what ways the linguistic elements interact with the non-linguist ones (materials, images, sounds, gestures) in multimodal discourses, applying concepts from Linguistics and Cognitive Semiotics: corporeality, ritualization, conceptual integrations. When it comes to texts signalized or accompanied by gestures, the research aims to investigate the distribution and integration of verbal and non-verbal resources in all channels used. When it comes to written texts, the research aims to investigate how the linguistic resources are used to circumvent the absence of non-linguistic resources.
Professor in charge: Leland Emerson McCleary
Project: Foreign Language and identity: meanings, images and memory about the English language in Brazil
Description: Study of the discourses around the English language in Brazil, focusing on the analysis of political-educational, pedagogical-academic and media discourses. Investigation about the effects of sense produced by these discourses, its relation with the discursive-social memory and with the construction of identity positions for the Brazilian subject.
Professor in charge: Marisa Grigoletto
Project: New literacies, multiliteracies and the study of foreign languages
Description: The new literacies and multiliteracies focus on the cultural ways of seeing, describing, explaining, understanding textual representations, values, ideologies, discourses, taking stances, having worldview, and understanding the relations between knowledge and power in society. This study focus on language, incorporating image, native language and foreign languages.
Professor in charge: Walkyria Maria Monte Mór
Project: The media discourse and identity(ies) constitution
Description: Study of media discourse, investigating the discursive functioning of several types of text and the constitution of identity(ies) of the involved subjects.
Professor in charge: Anna Maria Grammatico Carmagnani
Project Brazil/Canada: Knowledge Exchanges
Description: Study about multiliteracies, culture and globalization in Brazil and Canada through researches made by the participants of the National Teacher Education Project.
Professor in charge: Walkyria Maria Monte Mór
National Teacher Education Project: New Literacies, Multiliteracies and Foreign Languages
Description: Study about the current conditions of language teaching in Brazil and proposals for revising it through researches carried out by members of regional universities that participate in the project.
Professor in charge: Walkyria Maria Monte Mór
Project: Sematic and discursive question in foreign language
Description: This project aims to investigate, based on discursive, deconstructivist and psychoanalytic studies, the functioning of different types of discourse.
Professor in charge: Deusa Maria de Souza Pinheiro Passos
Project: Significance, delimitation of values and identity construction
Description: Cultural texts of different genres are studied, through the discoursive semiotics perspective, with focus in the relations established between the signification process and the delimitation of social values and the tensions between such relations and the individual or collective identity construction in a given social-cultural universe.
Professor in charge: Elizabeth Harkot-de-La-Taille
- Literature and History
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Project: Critical Approaches and Literature Teaching: Aesthetic and Historic Formations
Description: This research aims to investigate the critical formations conceived from the second half of the 20th century, as it tries to map the theoretical families that may be grouped according to how they approach the relationship between literature and society.
Professor in charge: Daniel Puglia
Project: Dramaturgy and History
Description: Analytical study of the representation of historical question in Modern and Contemporary North-American dramaturgy considering its formal nature, the techniques of figurative representation used, and the relationship between structure and matter represented in it.
Professor in charge: Maria Silvia Betti
Project: Fiction, poetry and Anglo-Irish contemporary culture.
Description: Study of contemporary Irish poetry and novel in the historical-social context.
Professor in charge: Laura Patricia Zuntini de Izarra
Project: Form and social process in the English novel
Description: Study of the relationship between literary form and social process in the English novel while seeking to display how historical processes were featured and formalized. Discussion about the ways that historical changes required each novelist to face the problem of giving artistic form to the materials available to them, which frequently resulted in tensions, fractures and internal contradictions that are of interest to analyze.
Professor in charge: Sandra Guardini Teixeira Vasconcelos
Project: Critical theories and literatures from the diaspora, from exile and immigrations
Description: Study of the main utopic elements present on critical and literary texts and its transformations into dystopias and heterotopias within the diasporic spaces of English language in Latin America.
Professor in charge: Laura Patricia Zuntini de Izarra
Project: British and North-American dramaturgy: forms of history
Description: Study of the British and North-American dramaturgies within the context of Modern/Contemporary theater. Research of the relations between theater, history and dramatic forms.
Professor in charge: Mayumi Denise Senoi Ilari
Project: Theater and Society in the Contemporary Scene
Description: Research about the theater written and produced mid-20th century, with emphasis in the relationship between theater and society. It encompasses, among others, political theater and its ramifications, avant-garde theater, collective theater, theater of the animated form.
Professor in charge: Mayumi Denise Senoi Ilari
- Foreign Language and Education
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Project: Designating knowledge(s): representations of knowledge and relations with English teachers’ knowledge in public schools
Description: Study of the concept of proficiency and non-proficiency in foreign language, investigating (i) effects in school context produced by a notion constituted around the total knowledge (mastery) of a foreign language and (ii) implications for the identity construction of teacher and student in public English teaching.
Professor in charge: Deusa Maria de Souza Pinheiro Passos
Project: Teaching and learning of conventionality
Description: Study of the several conventional categories of the English language in a lexical approach based on Corpus Linguistics methodology, which privileges the observation of authentic data in opposition to intuitive data.
Professor in charge: Stella Esther Ortweiler Tagnin
Project: Foreign Language teaching and learning in a discursive perspective
Description: The project aims to deepen the scientific knowledge around the relationship between native language and foreign language through analysis of discourses about these languages and about its teaching and learning in several discourse domains. Its general objectives are: a) contribute to the studies of the constitution of subjectivity, as well as of language learning (native and foreign), problematizing a view that polarize them as if independent and static; b) strengthen relations between research and middle and high school, and creating opportunities for dialogue and exchange of experiences between researchers and teachers; c) contribute to teachers’ education, producing material for reflection about the identity construction of the subject, misleadingly stable and fixed.
Professor in charge: Marisa Grigoletto
Project: Foreign language teaching-learning under a socio-historic-cultural optic
Description: investigate the foreign language learning-teaching process by making use of Social-Historical-Cultural Activity Theory (Vygostsky, 1987; Leontiev, 1981; Engstrom, 1987) and, as a result of the researches, suggest pedagogical actions that promote the development in order to achieve the vygotskian principal that true learning leads to human development.
Professor in charge: Marília Mendes Ferreira
Project: Academic literacy in English and Portuguese: an investigation in multiple aspects
Description: Due to the increasing pressure from government agencies for researchers to publish internationally, translated into the well-known expression “publish or perish” and the initiatives of internationalization of Brazilian universities, the Brazilian researcher is faced with the need for an academic literacy not only in Portuguese, but also in Science’s lingua franca, English. This project aims to investigate the several aspects of academic literacy: didactic resources, teachers’ preparation for the teaching of this ability, students’ difficulties in the mastery of academic discourse, geopolitical and sociological questions involved in this issue. This project seeks to offer as result of its researches pedagogical material and teacher training courses for academic writing teaching both in English and Portuguese. This project is associated to the Laboratory of Academic Literacy in Native Language and Foreign Languages of the University of São Paulo.
Professor in charge: Marília Mendes Ferreira