Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Department of Spanish and Portuguese

   

Helen Lima de Sousa is interested in Brazilian literature and issues of race in Brazilian society. Her current research is on the North-South divide in Brazil and focuses on how 20th and 21st century Northeastern Brazilian writers deal with the stereotypes of Northeasterners in their writings. In particular, she draws from systems justification theory, which looks into stereotype exemplars such as "poor but happy" and "poor but honest". Authors analysed in her research are Jorge Amado, Jose Lins do Rego, Graciliano Ramos, Rachel de Queiros and Ronaldo Correia de Brito.

For her PhD (very close to submission) she worked on Brazilian Romanticism and how writers of this period responded to Brazil's pre-colonial and colonial past as they sought to discover a "true" symbol of Brazilian national identity in the decades that followed independence from Portugal in 1822. In particular, her thesis focused on perceptions of civilization and primitiveness and analysed novels by Jose de Alencar and Antonio Goncalves Teixeira e Sousa, and a short story by Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen.