- The Postgraduate Programs are organized in Lines of Research and, within each line, by Research Projects
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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: Contemporaneity, parallelisms, and paradoxes. Renewed readings in dialogue
Description: Study of aesthetic elements in Literature and other arts in counterpoint. Rereading of narratives in contemporaneity based on the effects of modernity and the strategies used by different genres and artistic expressions with the goal of establishing a dialogue between different texts and contexts.
Professor in charge: Laura Patricia Zuntini de Izarra (lizarra@usp.br)
Project: Lessons on the novel - theory, history, and circulation
Description: This research project aims to examine the novel genre from the perspective of the various theoretical approaches that seek(sought) to discuss it since its rise in the 18th century. The history and circulation of the genre will also be the object of investigation, in order to address its development and dissemination over time, in the novel's relationship with different socio-historical contexts. Emphasis is given in this project to the dialogue between England and Brazil and the historical-formal aspects of the works under analysis.
Professor in charge: Sandra Guardini Teixeira Vasconcelos (sgtvasco@usp.br)
- Culture Studies
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Project: Circulation of ideas in the 19th century: the Modern Tradition of H. Ibsen and A. Strindberg
Description: The new research aims to place the two playwrights in dialogue and confrontation when both faced the crisis of theater and created the “modern tradition”. And the crucial question remains: what does modernity consist of?
Professor in charge: Munira Hamud Mutran
Project: Materialist Cultural Critique
Description: The Materialist Cultural Critique project intends to study this critical approach and determine its productivity for literature and culture studies.
Professor in charge: Maria Elisa Burgos Pereira da Silva Cevasco
Project: Identity, social, and cultural dynamics through the literary lens
Description: Analysis of the dynamic that governs the paths of an individual or collective subject to generate their own cultural identity as a representation of the “Other” through literary texts that question different forms of alterity and the rhetoric of the everyday.
Professor in charge: Laura Patricia Zuntini de Izarra (lizarra@usp.br).
Project: Financialization and Social Process - a Study of Space in Contemporary Cultural Production in English.
Description: The objective of the research project is the study of figurations of space in contemporary culture in English, with emphasis on literature and cinema. The intention is to start from reflection on the images of urban spaces in the art of historical avant-gardes and then to think about the new cognitive and artistic challenges imposed by globalization, the hegemony of financial capital and real estate speculation in global metropolises.
Professor in charge: Marcos César de Paula Soares
- Literature and History
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Project: From history to the theory of the British novel in the long eighteenth century (1660-1832)
Description: One of the privileged chapters of novel theory is the sedimentation of novelistics in Great Britain during the long eighteenth century (1660-1832). Paradigmatically, the abstractions of materialist critics, from Lukács to Bakhtin, are correlated with the crystallization of rhetorical and narrative procedures that attempt to account for the simultaneous advent of the commercial revolution, the periodic press, the Protestant Reformation, and the bases of the scientific method. This persuasive explanatory scheme, associated with names like Ian Watt and Michael Mckeon, disregards the Scottish and Irish contributions to the British novelistic tradition. In other words, the conventions of the English novel and the social processes peculiar to England are selectively generalized, as if extensible to the literary and historical experience of the United Kingdom as a whole. Given this, in a critical exercise where the boundaries between literary theory and history are dissolved, it is proposed to investigate how the formal experimentation of Scottish and Irish prose writers and novelists of the eighteenth century (Tobias Smollett, James Macpherson/Ossian, Henry Mackenzie, John Moore, Maria Edgeworth, Regina Maria Roche, Elizabeth Hamilton, and Sydney Owenson) corroborate or destabilize the scheme associated with Watt and Mckeon. To this end, vocabulary and concepts rarely used in the historiography of the British novel will be mobilized, but which capture cultural and political issues that saturated the public debate in eighteenth-century Scotland and Ireland: nation, Union, sympathy, barbarism, progress, and refinement
Professor in charge: Thiago Rhys Bezerra Cass
Project: Comparative Dramaturgy United States/Brazil
Description: Historical-critical and analytical study of US dramaturgy staged and published in Brazil, taking into account its formal configurations, figuration resources, and dialogue with criticism in the Brazilian context..
Professor in charge: Maria Silvia Betti
Project: Dramaturgy and Form in British and North American Scenes.
Description: Following up on the Project "British and North American Dramaturgies: Forms of History" (2011-2020), the present project foresees the research of the relationship between dramaturgical form and historical matter in the context of studying British and North American dramaturgies in modern/contemporary theater.
Professor in charge: Mayumi Denise Senoi Ilari (ilarimayumi@usp.br)
Project: Studies of Dramaturgy, Theater, and Society
Description: Study Groups focused on research about political theater and related dramaturgies, experimental dramaturgy, popular theater, and animated forms theater, also encompassing relations between English-language theater and Brazilian theater.
Professor in charge: Mayumi Denise Senoi Ilari (ilarimayumi@usp.br)
Project: Devices for the figuration of history in dramaturgy and performances in the US context
Description:This project intends to undertake an analytical and critical survey of the resources used in the US context to represent and discuss issues related to the historical and political sphere in dramaturgy and staging in the period between the second post-war and the current moment.
Professor in charge: Maria Silvia Betti
Project: Lessons on the novel - theory, history, and circulation
Description: This research project aims to examine the novel genre from the perspective of the diverse theoretical approaches that seek(sought) to discuss it since its rise in the 18th century. The history and circulation of the genre will also be the object of investigation, in order to address its development and dissemination over time, in relation to the novel with different socio-historical contexts. Emphasis is given in this project to the dialogue between England and Brazil and the historical-formal aspects of the works under analysis.
Professor in charge: Sandra Guardini Teixeira Vasconcelos (sgtvasco@usp.br)
Project: Literature, Art, and Society in the Modern and Contemporary Scene
Description: Continuing the Project "Theater and Society in the Contemporary Scene" (2016-2020), this research Project includes the study of artistic and literary forms created and/or produced from the mid-twentieth century onward, in relation to their historical and cultural matter. Starting from relations between art, literature, theater, and society, it includes, among others, research on text-scene relations, political theater and its ramifications, avant-garde theater, collective theater, street theater, and puppet and animated forms theater. Within the scope of literary and dramaturgical expressions, it also covers the relationships between literature, art, and society.
Professor in charge: Mayumi Denise Senoi Ilari
Project: Literatures in movement: imperialism, the colonial matrix of power, and the decolonization of being and knowing.
Description: Analysis of the relations between literature and history with the purpose of revealing the different representations of imperialist knowledge and colonialism in the process of decolonization of being. The object of study is: post-colonial narratives, narratives of migrants, refugees, and diasporic beings.
Professor in charge: Laura Patricia Zuntini de Izarra
Project: Systems of Power - cultural, historical, and political interactions.
Description: The objective of this research will be to investigate how systems of power can be understood based on diverse aesthetic and textual records. Our intention is to use not only traditional literary and cultural production in English, but also to deal with an expanded concept of literature, encompassing essayistic texts originating from different areas: history, politics, economics, sociology, and philosophy. Initially, we will focus attention on the work of authors such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Richard Wolff, and David Harvey. We will also address aesthetic and textual productions that, to some extent, dialogue with the work of these authors.
Professor in charge: Daniel Puglia
- Language, Education and Society
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Project: GEELLE - Study Group on Linguistic Education in Foreign Languages
Description: The research project investigates linguistic education and teacher training in foreign languages, focusing on the English language, under the perspectives of critical education and literacies.
Professor in charge: Daniel de Mello Ferraz
Project: Intersemiotic and among semiotics - practices and objects in the English language
Description: The statement by Groupe µ (2015) that meaning is amodal guides both the analysis of hybrid objects (here, being the verbal element in English), where image and letter alternate and complement each other, and the analysis of the conversion of objects in English into distinct languages, with the objective of unraveling the processes through which meanings reappear, are conserved, or transformed, notably around the social values of a given group and the tensions they impress upon the world, as well as the effects of identity meaning produced.
Professor in charge: Elizabeth Harkot-de-La-Taille (beth.harkot@usp.br)
Project: National Literacies Project - Teacher Training and Decoloniality
Description: The National Literacies Project: Teacher Training and Decoloniality continues research and studies that had been developed by the National Literacies Project: Language, Culture, Education and Technology (2015-2021). It foresees the development of an activity plan focused on studies, research, and the promotion of language teacher training, focusing on issues, perspectives, and concepts consistent with the project's purposes: cultural (coloniality-decoloniality, plurality, diversity; hybridism; heterogeneity, etc.); social (concepts of societies and communities, individuals/citizens, social mobility, superdiversity, and others); (different forms of promoting education); linguistic (conceptions of language; multimodality in communication, in interaction; critical literacies); technological (use of technologies; epistemological and ontological changes related to digital technology). Approximately 40 Brazilian and 12 foreign universities participate in this project.
Professor in charge: Walkyria Maria Monte Mór
Project: Critical Literacy and Education in the Globalized World
Description: This project focuses on the issue of the concept of critical literacy, its current and possible characterizations in applied linguistics. It takes as its starting point the current context of globalization which results in flows, crossings, and intercultural encounters; encounters where texts, languages, objects, and people of diverse cultural and linguistic origins come together, and which require careful and critical processes of mutual comprehension and interpretation to avoid possible conflicts that may arise from the uncontrolled circulation of values and differences. As such, this project represents a continuation of and an advance on the results of my previous projects: 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 (mdesouza@usp.br)
Project: Transnational Network on Critical Literacies
Description: International research group formed by approximately 150 academics from universities across the 5 continents, with interest in Critical Education and Critical Literacies in Basic and University Education and their reflections in society.
Professor in charge: Daniel de Mello Ferraz and Walkyria Maria Monte Mór
- Foreign Language and Education
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Project: Studies of Conventionality in areas of specialty
Description:Study of various conventional categories of the English language from a lexical approach perspective based on the methodology of Corpus Linguistics, which favors the observation of authentic data as opposed to intuitive data. Its main objective is the elaboration of English/Portuguese bilingual glossaries in areas of specialty.
Professor in charge: Stella Esther Ortweiler Tagnin
Project: Interface between Discourse Analysis and Ethnomusicology - imaginary representations between discursive materialities of sonic and verbal nature
Description: The objective of the project will be to analyze, based on the interface between Ethnomusicology and Discourse Analysis, the concept of cultural authenticity in discursive materialities of sonic (instrumental) and verbal (narratives of flamenco professionals) nature. The analysis corpus will be composed of a series of interviews with flamenco professionals, in the modalities of dance, music, and singing, coming from various regions of Brazil, whose realization is underway and managed by Pena Flamenco Brasil, headquartered in the capital of São Paulo. Their narratives will allow investigation of imaginary representations of these discursive materialities, which may shed light on how certain manifestations of language are constituted, in the encounter between distinct enunciative spaces (foreign languages and mother tongue). Much of the reflection on flamenco art is produced in the English language, due to the greater penetration of the language in university environments. Part of this production is in Spanish with translation into the English language.
Professor in charge: Deusa Maria de Souza Pinheiro Passos
Project: Academic Literacy in English at USP - texts and practices
Description: This project aims to investigate the practices for promoting academic literacy in the English Language undergraduate course and the postgraduate program.
Professor in charge: Marília Mendes Ferreira (mmferreira@usp.br)
Project: The Teaching-Learning of an Additional Language from a Vygotskian perspective
Description: This project aims to investigate the development provided by learning an additional language in formal or non-formal teaching contexts. Development is defined following assumptions of historical-cultural and activity theory (Davydov, 1988; Engstrom, 1987; VYgotsky, 1987).
Professor in charge: Marília Mendes Ferreira
- Translation Studies
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Project: The translation of Brazilian literature into English - cultural policies, individual agencies, and literary exchanges
Description: Starting from a discussion of the concept of "world literature," the project investigates translations of works of Brazilian literature into English, in the past and present, seeking to analyze the processes of selecting works, their financing by governmental institutions, and their circulation in the international cultural market. Political, ideological, and aesthetic factors that shape and determine the contours of literature's presence in the English-speaking world are also examined.
Professor in charge: Lenita Maria Rimoli Pisetta
Project: Aesthetic, political, ethical, and cultural aspects of translation
Description: The project approaches translation as a form of cultural intermediation that is determined by aesthetic, political, ethical, and historical factors. Every act of translation necessarily implies a displacement, a deracination, an invasion, and an acclimatization. Each of these steps involves identity issues, national traditions, cultural values, and aesthetic preferences that will determine the final result of the translation and its reception in the target culture. This perspective privileges the sociological bias of Translation Studies, and concepts from Pierre Bourdieu's Sociology, such as “social capital” and “symbolic capital,” may be useful in the proposed analyses.
Professor in charge: Lenita Maria Rimoli Pisetta
Project: COMET Project - Corpora and English/Portuguese bilingual glossaries
Description: Environment for Research in Translation and Teaching. The COMET project is composed of 3 corpora: CorTec (Technical Corpus), CoMAprend (Learner Corpus), and CorTrad (Translation Corpus). The current project foresees the expansion of CorTec with the addition of 10 new corpora, as well as the implementation of CoMAprend with compositions produced by students from extension and undergraduate courses. It also foresees the implementation of a parallel corpus with texts from the FAPESP Research Magazine in English and Portuguese, as part of CorTrad. It also includes bilingual glossaries in areas of specialty.
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 Power - Feminisms and Resistances
Description: The relationship between translation (written and oral) and power makes it necessary to situate the former in linguistic, social, and political contexts, considering it far from the idea of neutrality. Such contexts reveal the interested parties in the selection, production, reproduction, or omission of certain texts in time and space, with translation being intimately linked to issues of domination, affirmation, and resistance. The project scopes the relationship between translation and power, focusing on feminisms and forms of resistance. Regarding the feminism element, it covers the circulation of feminism through translation (social, material, political, historical, cultural, and institutional conditions), the biography of women translators and interpreters, the role and representation of translators and interpreters, publishers, activists, writers, and characters in the transmission of ideologies related to gender, race, and sexuality issues and in the transformation of power relations. It also aims to contribute to developing recent elaborations that feminist and gender theories can be applied to Translation Studies. Under the second element, forms of resistance, the relationship between translation and power is examined, including racial and minority issues, based on ideologies and the connections between politics and translation, including, among others, censorship, linguistic policies, and exploring the use of translation as a political tool for resistance.
Professor in charge: Luciana Carvalho Fonseca
