Richard Vernon
Teaching Professor of Portuguese
Dey Hall 337
(919) 843-1069
rmvernon@email.unc.edu
Richard Vernon is the director of the Portuguese language program and the advisor for the Portuguese major and minor. He teaches various periods of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian literature as well as Spanish and Portuguese language courses. He specializes in non-traditional and marginal literary forms that are appropriated for social and political subversion, for example, 18th-century Portuguese street literature and Brazilian children’s literature from the period of the military dictatorship. He has received two grants from the Luso-American Development Foundation to study relevant documents in the Portuguese National Archive (the Torre do Tombo) and the Lisbon National Library to research for his current book project that deals with social debates concerning the increasingly malleable class and gender roles that occurred within the medium of Portuguese 18th-century chapbook literature. In addition to articles on canonical lusophone writers and on cordel literature in Portugal, he also has published a book chapter on the use of food in Brazilian Children’s literature, a comparative article on American and Portuguese children’s literature, as well as several reference articles on Brazilian writers
