Holds a BA in French (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil), and a PhD in Cultural Studies (University of Ottawa, Canada). He currently holds a position of Associate Teaching Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at the University of Notre Dame, USA. Born in Belém, Pará, right in the Brazilian Amazon Region, Marcio Bahia specializes in Brazilian literary and cultural studies. His research focuses on the tecnobrega music scene, among other contemporary topics in Brazilian music.

Tecnobrega, a musical genre that splices different rhythms, is primarily created by poor populations in the Amazon regions of Brazil. Bahia studies how technology is adopted in the tecnobrega scene and how it is used in the ongoing process of cultural legitimization of the rhythm. On the topic, Bahia has published “The Periphery Rises: Technology and Cultural Legitimization in Belém’s Tecnobrega” in Journal of Lusophone Studies 13 (2015):33-54, the journal of the American Portuguese Studies Association.  Available at https://jls.apsa.us/index.php/jls/article/view/3 

Bahia teaches courses in Portuguese language and Brazilian literature and culture at the University of Notre Dame – Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, such as Brazilian Pop Culture and Brazilian Music, Culture and Society.

Lígia Bezerra was born in Várzea Alegre, Ceará, Brazil. She moved to the United States in 2006, where she completed a master's in Portuguese at the University of New Mexico and a doctorate in Portuguese with a minor in cultural studies at Indiana University. She also holds a master's in linguistics from Universidade Federal do Ceará. She is a member of the research group Discurso, Cotidiano e Práticas Culturais – DISCUTA. She taught Portuguese and English language and linguistics in Brazil, and has taught Portuguese and Spanish language and Lusophone literature and culture, as well as Latin American culture, in the United States. Bezerra's research interests include Brazilian Popular Music, Latin American literature and culture, consumption, everyday life, neoliberalism, and democracy. She has published articles in journals such as Chasqui, Journal of Lusophone Studies (formerly known as ellipsis), Revista de Estudos de Literatura Brasileira Contemporânea, Luso-Brazilian Review, and Cultural Studies. Her book, Everyday Consumption in Twenty-First-Century Brazilian Fiction (Purdue University Press, 2022), is the first in-depth study to map out the representation of consumption in contemporary Brazilian prose, highlighting how our interactions with commodities connect seemingly disconnected areas of everyday life, such as eating habits, the growth of prosperity theology, and ideas of success and failure. Her current project focuses on how Brazilian Popular Music articulates resistance to anti-democratic forces in the twenty-first century. 

Krista Brune is Associate Professor of Portuguese and Spanish at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research situates modern and contemporary Brazilian literature within hemispheric American or transatlantic Lusophone contexts through the lens of translation, visual and popular cultures, and intellectual history. She is the author of Creative Transformations: Travels and Translations of Brazil in the Americas (SUNY Press, 2020) and the co-editor of Listening to Others: Eduardo Coutinho’s Documentary Cinema (SUNY Press, 2024). 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. Her publications on music include “Musical Nationalism for the 21st Century: From Andrade’s Archive to A Barca’s Repertoire” (ellipsis, 2013) and “Subversive Instruments: Protest and Politics of MPB and the Nueva Canción” (Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, 2015).

Senior Language Tutor in Portuguese at the University of Manchester, UK. He holds a BA in English language and Language Teaching from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), in Brazil, and a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the same institution. José has taught languages for over 25 years, and his research and scholarship focus on language teaching materials development, Portuguese as an Additional Language teaching, especially in British higher education, and song literacy. He has researched about the use of songs in language teaching since 2009, having published papers and taught workshops and short courses on this topic in conferences and several online and in person events in countries like Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Denmark, Peru, Portugal, Spain, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

Tulane University

Universidade Federal do Ceará

Fernanda Guida is an Assistant Professor at Spelman College, USA. Originally from Brazil, she holds a B.A. in Letras from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, and both M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Georgia. Prior to Spelman College she was a faculty member and the director of the Portuguese program in the Lauder Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a scholar of Literature, Culture and Society of Portuguese speaking countries, specializing in the analyses of sociopolitical Brazil in the 20th and 21st century through the lenses of cultural productions. Brazilian music plays a fundamental role in her teaching, ranging from language classes to her Brazilian Popular Music course, and it is also a significant aspect of her research, which includes studies on Chico Buarque’s work, the 80s music in Brazil and the intersection of music and literature.

Maria das Dores Nogueira Mendes was born in Limoeiro do Norte, Ceará, Brazil. She is Professora Adjunta at the Department of Letras Vernáculas (DLV) and the Programa de Pós-Graduação em Linguística (PPGL), at Universidade Federal do Ceará, where she conducts research about Brazilian Popular Music. She is the leader of the research group Discurso, Cotidiano e Práticas Culturais – DISCUTA. She teaches Portuguese Linguistics, with emphasis on Discourse Analysis. She has published articles and book chapters about Cearense artists and music for children in journals such as Per Musi, (Con)Textos Linguísticos,  and Signótica. Her book, O duro aço da voz do Pessoal do Ceará: investimento vocal, cenografia e ethos (Imprensa Universitária, 2021), analyzes the vocal qualities of singers Ednardo, Fagner, and Belchior, from a discursive standpoint, looking into how these qualities are embedded in the scenographies present in the lyrics. The book also investigates how these vocal qualities construct an ethos  that characterizes the position of Pessoal do Ceará in Brazilian lyric-music discourse. Mendes has also edited the volume As trilhas da infância: o discurso literomusical brasileiro para crianças (Imprensa Universitária, 2023). She has directed dissertations on various artists from various positions in Brazilian Popular Music, such as Luiz Gonzaga, Dorival Caymmi, and Criolo.

Mylene Mizrahi is a PhD in Cultural Anthropology (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, University College London). She is Assistant Professor at PUC-Rio (Department of Education, Postgraduate Program in Education, Postgraduate Program in Social Sciences), Jovem Cientista do Nosso Estado (FAPERJ), and director of Estetipop - laboratory of ethnographic research on aesthetics, politics, and pop culture. Her doctoral thesis, A Estética Funk Carioca: criação e conectividade em Mr. Catra, received the IPP-Rio Maurício de Almeida Abreu Award (Secretaria Municipal de Urbanismo do Rio de Janeiro) and was published by Editora 7Letras (Coleção Sociologia e Antropologia/Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro) as well as Figurino funk: roupa, dança e corpo em um baile carioca. She has also published several articles and book chapters and edited book and special number. Her ethnographic research has been conducted alongside her continued attention to the aesthetic and sensitive dimensions of social life and the ways in which we become human through our engagement with things in the world. Her research interests include aesthetics, music and peripheral arts; artistic subjectivation, personhood and materiality; corporeality, gender and race relations; consumption, fashion and image. 

University of Wisconsin - Madison 

Currently a local presence in the New Orleans music scene, award-winning composer and educator Geovane Paiva Santos, is a native Brazilian from the city of Belo Horizonte. Santos holds a B.M. in Music Performance from the Universidade do Estado de Minas Gerais (UEMG), majoring in both Classical Guitar and Music Education (2011). While still associated with UEMG, Santos received a fellowship from the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) to conduct musicological archival research and restoration work of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Minas Gerais’ mestizo classical music, a.k.a Barroco Mineiro (2010-2014).

Aligning his academic pursuits with a rising professional music career in jazz and Brazilian popular music in the U.S., Santos went on to receive an M.A. in Jazz Studies from the University

of New Orleans (2018). His masters’ thesis entitled “Bossa Nova is not snapped on 2 and 4” was

a study of music through a language accent framework where he analyzed and compared celebrated versions of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s composition Chega de Saudade (U.S. and Brazilian charts and recordings) highlighting the ways in which U.S. musicians mistranscribed, mistranslated and erased the Brazilian “accent” through Americanization/jazzification/cultural appropriation as they proliferated Jobim’s work around the world.

At Tulane University, beyond his enrollment as a Ph.D. student in the Latin American Studies program, Santos is also a community-engaged scholar and a Mellon Foundation fellow. His community-engaged scholarship focuses on developing a project to transcribe New Orleans native, master percussionist, and U.S. Afro-Brazilian cultural ambassador Curtis Pierre’s empirical knowledge into method books to create popular education tools. Santos’ doctoral research aims to expand and further explore his work in music mistranslations through interdisciplinarity, in other words, he is working out methodologies in which song titles, lyrical content, sheet music, and recorded performances can become gateways for critical analysis of symbolic aspects of music that surpass music theory. This way he uses bossa nova songs, and 1950-1960s developmentalist rhetoric as primary sources to discuss race, class, history, imperialism, and cultural appropriation, discussing how Brazil’s marketing and branding bossa nova as a white Brazilian music genre negatively affected how the non-Brazilian world still hears and plays bossa nova today.

Snyder is a Research Fellow in the Institute of Ethnomusicology at NOVA University Lisbon in Portugal. He is the author of Critical Brass: Street Carnival and Musical Activism in Olympic Rio de Janeiro (Wesleyan University Press 2022), and he is currently undertaking research on a second book project tentatively titled Musical Excess: Sentiments of Coloniality in Lisbon’s Brazilian Carnival. He has participated in various editorial projects, having coedited HONK! A Street Band Renaissance of Music and Activism (Routledge 2020), At the Crossroads of Music and Social Justice (Indiana University Press 2022), and Festival Activism (IUP Forthcoming), and he is an Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Festive Studies. He has published in leading music journals including Ethnomusicology, Ethnomusicology Forum, Luso-Brazilian Review, and Latin American Music Review among others. His articles and book chapters cover a wide range of theoretical topics, such as race, gender, activism, disability, capitalism, cultural diplomacy, migration, affect, and postcolonialism. He is also a trumpeter who plays a wide variety of styles including the main genres of his research, Brazilian popular music and brass bands.

Daniel da Silva is Assistant Professor of Portuguese at Rutgers University - New Brunswick, NJ,  with a Ph.D. in Latin American and Iberian Cultures from Columbia University, NY. Born and  raised in Newark, NJ’s Portuguese enclave, the Ironbound, he researches queer subjectivities  in Luso-Afro-Brazilian cultures through popular music and performance. He is co-director of the  Queer Aqui international working group, which hosted their gathering in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil,  in May of 2023. He has published “Unbearable Fadistas: António Variações and Fado as Queer  Praxis” (Journal of Lusophone Studies 2018), and “Black Mothers and Black Boats: Queer,  Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian Intersections in Ney Matogrosso’s ‘Mãe Preta (Barco Negro)’”  (Journal of Lusophone Studies 2019), and more his opinion piece on Portuguese as a Latinx  language was featured on NJ.com: “Anitta and Latinx Cultures [In Portuguese].” NJ.com,  September 2022. His forthcoming book is entitled: Trans Tessituras: Listening for Black Queer  Lusophone Diaspora. 

The University of Kansas

Tulane University

College of the Holy Cross