Carolina Sá Carvalho
Assistant Professor of Portuguese & Spanish
Dey Hall 320
919-962-2062
carolsa@email.unc.edu
Carolina Sá Carvalho’s research interests include 19th and 20th century Brazilian and Spanish American literatures and photography, empire, memory, and the relationships between literature, science and technology. She is currently working on a book-length manuscript tentatively entitled Traces of the Unseen: Photography, Writing and Contact in Three Expeditions in the Tropics. The book examines the afterlives of photographs, field-notes, and diaries that correspond to early twentieth-century encounters between Western travelers and local communities in remote regions of Brazil and Peru: the Amazon and the sertão. It considers how travelers such as Euclides da Cunha, Roger Casement and Claude Lévi-Strauss reflected upon questions of knowledge, perception, and memory in order to interrogate the role of technologies of inscription. Second, it investigates the trajectories of the written and photographic traces of these encounters, their re-articulation in different historical, legal, humanitarian, and anthropological narratives. Carolina Sá Carvalho has published and forthcoming articles on nineteenth century realist novels, slavery and photography. Her next long-term project studies the emergence of documentary practices related to the formation of humanitarian and ecological imaginaries in Latin-America.