Krista Brune
151 Burrowes
Curriculum Vitae:
Education:
Research Interests:
Biography:
Krista Brune specializes in modern and contemporary Luso-Afro-Brazilian literature through the lens of translation, visual and popular cultures, and intellectual history. Her first book Creative Transformations: Travels and Translations of Brazil in the Americas (SUNY Press, 2020) analyzes key moments in the travels and translations of Brazilian artists and intellectuals from the 1870s to the present. She is now working on a book that situates Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Luanda as global Lusophone cities. The project documents how contemporary writers and artists respond to legacies of colonialism and recent urban transformation that threaten to erase histories and displace communities. Another area of her research centers on Latin American popular music, film, and cultural policies. As a Fulbright grantee to Brazil in 2007, she studied the politics of popular Brazilian music in relation to the nueva canción and nueva trova. More recently, she has co-edited, with Natalia Brizuela, Listening to Others: Eduardo Coutinho’s Documentary Cinema (SUNY Press, May 2024), the first English-language volume dedicated to the Brazilian filmmaker.
She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses that place Brazil in a hemispheric or transatlantic framework, including Luso-Brazilian Cinema, Latin American Cosmopolitanisms, and Commodity Cultures. As a visiting professor at the Universidade de São Paulo in May 2019, she co-taught the graduate seminar “Tradução e política nas Américas.” She also organizes speakers’ series and cultural events related to the Portuguese program. In 2020 and 2021, she was a funded participant in Penn State’s Redesigning Modernities project. She was the Dorothy W. Gilpatrick University Endowed Fellow in the Humanities from July 2021 to June 2023. Currently, she is the director of the Global and International Studies program.
Selected Articles:
- “Orpheu’s Modernist Crossroads: Between Iberia and the World.” Luso-Brazilian Review, vol. 60 no. 2, 2023, p. 104-122.
- “Literary Mapping of Migration and Multilingualism in São Paulo’s Bom Retiro Neighborhood.” Journal of Literary Multilingualism, vol. 1, no. 2, 2023, pp. 145-166.
- “The Temporalities of Diasporic Heritage.” Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 36/37, Fall 2021/Spring 2022, pp. 309-27.
- “From Macunaíma to Davi Kopenawa: Alternative Approaches to Translation and the Worlds of Literature.” Journal of Lusophone Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, 2021, pp. 26-47.
Pronouns:
- She/her
Publications
Listening to Others: Eduardo Coutinho’s Documentary Cinema
- Editor(s): Natalia Brizuela & Krista Brune
- Publication Date: 2024
- Website: https://sunypress.edu/Books/L/Listening-to-Others
Listening to Others is the first English-language volume dedicated solely to the vast corpus of the preeminent Brazilian director, Eduardo Coutinho (1933–2014). From his early work in the 1960s to his last, posthumous film in 2015, Coutinho transformed documentary filmmaking in Brazil and beyond. Described as an informal linguist and savage anthropologist, Coutinho filmed encounters with people different from himself that foregrounded their voices and his role as an attentive listener, creating a “cinema of listening.” This collection brings together leading scholars of film, literature, visual culture, Brazilian studies, and Latin American studies, from the United States and Latin America, to examine both Coutinho’s masterpieces and less studied films. Using a range of approaches, the contributors invite new ways of understanding the documentarian’s trajectory and importance as his work transformed in response to dictatorship, democratization, and other political, social, and technological changes over the course of five decades. The volume also features original translations of a selection of Coutinho’s writings and key texts by Brazilian critics to offer a historical perspective on his filmmaking and its reception.
Creative Transformations: Travels and Translations of Brazil in the Americas
- Author(s): Krista Brune
- Publication Date: 2020
- Website: https://sunypress.edu/Books/C/Creative-Transformations
In Creative Transformations, Krista Brune brings together Brazilian fiction, film, journalism, essays, and correspondence from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Drawing attention to the travels of Brazilian artists and intellectuals to the United States and other parts of the Americas, Brune argues that experiences of displacement have had a significant influence on their work. Across Brazilian literary and cultural history, translation becomes a way of navigating and representing the resulting encounters between languages, interactions with Spanish Americans, and negotiations of complex identities. While Creative Transformations engages extensively with theories of translation from different national and disciplinary contexts, it also constructs a vision of translation uniquely attuned to the place of Brazil in the Americas. Brune reveals the hemispheric underpinnings of works by renowned Brazilian writers such as Machado de Assis, Sousândrade, Mário de Andrade, Silviano Santiago, and Adriana Lisboa. In the process, she rethinks the dynamics between cosmopolitan and national desires and between center and periphery in global literary markets.