Krista Brune

Ph.D., Hispanic Languages and Literatures (Luso-Brazilian track), University of California, Berkeley

M.A., Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Cultures, University of California, Berkeley

A.B., Spanish and Portuguese, Princeton University

Krista Brune specializes in 19^th to 21^st-century Brazilian literature in a hemispheric context through the lens of translation, visual and popular cultures, and intellectual history. Her current book analyzes how translation as a process of creative transformation contributes to the visibility of a modern Brazil in the Americas since the 1870s. With its unique archive of the New York-based periodical O Novo Mundo, Mário de Andrade’s modernist masterpiece Macunaíma and its adaptations, and contemporary fiction and criticism by Silviano Santiago and Adriana Lisboa, the study inserts Brazilian literature and culture into recent debates about translatability, world literature, and cosmopolitanism and underscores the often-overlooked presence of Brazilians in the United States.

Krista participated in the 2013 NEH Summer Institute on the Centrality of Translation in the Humanities and has published translations of stories by Machado de Assis and Nuno Ramos and critical articles on Brazilian documentarian Eduardo Coutinho. Another area of her research centers on Latin American popular music and cultural policies. As a Fulbright grantee to Brazil in 2007, she studied the politics of popular Brazilian music in relation to Spanish American music.

She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses that situate Brazil in a hemispheric or transatlantic perspective, including Translation in the Americas, Race and Gender in Luso-Brazilian Cinema, and Voices of the Povo/Pueblo. She also organizes speakers’ series and cultural events related to the Portuguese program. In Spring 2019, she will be a resident scholar at the Penn State Humanities Institute.

Selected Publications:

• “Retranslating the Brazilian Imperial Project: O Novo Mundo’s Depictions of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition.” Journal of Lusophone Studies, vol. 3, no. 2, 2018, pp. 1-23.
• “Reconceiving Hipólito José da Costa as a Transatlantic Translator.” Luso-Brazilian Review, vol. 55, no. 1, 2018, pp. 1-26.
• “The Necessities and Dangers of Translation: Brazilian Literature on a Global Stage.” Comparative Critical Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, 2018, pp. 5-24.
• “Resituating Nitheroy in the Translation Zone: Transnational Travels, Creative Transformations, and the Making of a Modern Brazil.” Hispanic Review, vol. 86, no. 1, 2018, pp. 69-90.
• “Translating Humor, Nationalisms, Etc. in Mário de Andrade’s Modernist Writings.” Translation Review, vol. 99, no. 1, 2017, pp. 45-57.
• “Subversive Instruments: Protest and Politics of MPB and the Nueva Canción.” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, vol. 33, 2015, pp. 128-145.