Luís Madureira

Education

• Ph.D. University of California, San Diego

Bio

Luís Madureira earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, San Diego. His research interests include Luso-Brazilian colonial and postcolonial studies, Modernism and Modernity in Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean, early modern and colonial studies, and theatre and performance in Africa. He has published two books and several articles on these and related topics.

Research

Currently working on a book-length project that centers on the complex ways in which Mozambican drama (ranging from the Marxist-Leninist republic to neoliberal, multiparty democracy) negotiates and re-articulates ethnic, class and gender identities both against and alongside dominant nationalist ideologies. His second on-going project examines several Luso-African historical novels and explores the entanglements inherent to the adoption of a classical European genre buttressed by the very notions of cultural difference, gendered subjectivity and teleological time that postcolonial reinterpretations of the past ostensibly seek to interrogate.

Selected Publications

• Afonso I Mvemba a Nzinga: His Life and Correspondence. John K. Thornton. Translations by Luís Madureira. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2023.
• “Postcolonial Historical Drama and the Aporias of Tricontinentalism in Angola.” Forthcoming in Comparative Literature Studies. Vol. 62, no. 2 (2025).
• “The Real Tragedy of Historical Contingency: Rehearsing the Failed Revolution in Postcolonial Angolan Theatre.” Journal of Lusophone Studies. Special issue on Luso-African Literatures. Journal of Lusophone Studies 8.1 (Spring 2023): 5-29.
• “Global South, Resistance, and the Anthropocene: A Long Walk in the Great Night.”  The Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Latin American Literary and Cultural Forms. Eds. Guillermina De Ferrari and Mariano Siskind. New York: Taylor and Francis, 2023: 367-376.
• “An Aesthetics of Iron: Lima Barreto, Avant-Garde Fascism, and Modernismo’s Erasure of Blackness.” Portuguese Studies: The literatures, cultures and histories of the Portuguese-speaking world. Special issue on Brazilian Modernismo. 38.2 (Dec. 2022).
•  “Theatre, Négritude and the Performative Unmasking of Brazil’s ‘Blackface Modernism.’” Santa Barbara Portuguese Studies. 2nd Ser: special issue on Brazilian    Modernismo. Vol. 10, 2022: 213-239.

Awards & Honors

• 2010 (Feb.-Dec.), Fulbright Teaching and Research Grant (Mozambique)
• 2009-2011, Vilas Associate Award (UW-Madison)
• 2006, University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, Samuel Stone Distinguished Alumnus Award
• 2005, 2006, Instituto dos Arquivos Nacionais / Torre do Tombo Research fellowship
• 2004, Luso-American Foundation for Development Research fellowship

Courses

• African 300: Tales of Love & War
• African 300: African Literature in Translation: Coming of Age Narratives
• African 402: Theory of African Literature
• African 606: African Historical Fiction
• African 905: The Invention of Africa

Advising

Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, Gender and Environmental Studies, Theatre and Performance, Postcolonial Historical Fiction, Early Modern Studies