Malcolm McNee

Malcolm McNee teaches interactive Portuguese language courses, including an accelerated introduction designed for Spanish speakers. He also teaches a variety of interdisciplinary humanities topics in Brazilian and Comparative Lusophone Studies, including:

• Brasil Profundo: Landscape and the Environment in Brazilian Culture
• Borderlands of Portuguese: Multilingualism, Language Policy, and Identity
• Indigenous Brazil: Past, Present, Future
• Popular Music, Nationhood, and Globalization in the Portuguese-Speaking World
• Envisioning Lusofonia: Transnational Encounters and Imaginaries in Portuguese-language Film
• Author, Authority, Authoritarianism: Writing and Resistance in the Portuguese-speaking World [taught in English]

His research interests bridge environmental humanities and contemporary Brazilian cultural studies, examining expressions of environmental conservation and justice issues in literature, film and visual arts. His first monograph, The Environmental Imaginary in Brazilian Poetry and Art, examines a range of artistic responses to environmental change and vulnerability in contemporary Brazil, from efforts to connect art with activism to conceptually oriented interrogations of our ideas of nature, place-making, and ecology. He has published essays in numerous journals (see below) on topics ranging from rural place and identity in Brazilian literature and popular music to race and transnational identity in the Portuguese-speaking world.

He is currently researching engagements with indigeneity in contemporary Brazilian literature and visual culture, including literary and intermedia translations of indigenous verbal arts in contemporary Brazil. He is also working on an anthology of Brazilian environmental writing in English translation.

In addition to advising for the major and minor in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies and for study-abroad in Brazil and Portugal, McNee does advising for the Translation Studies Concentration and contributes to Smith’s programs in Latin American and Latino/a Studies and World Literatures.

Selected Publications

The Environmental Imaginary in Brazilian Poetry and Art. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Translator of Eden-Brazil, by Moacyir Scliar. Tagus Press, 2019.

Co-editor, Gilberto Freyre e Os Estudos Latino-Americanos, with Joshua Lund. Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2006.

Essays in Luso-Brazilian Review; Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies; Brasil/Brazil; Ellipsis: Journal of the American Portuguese Studies Association; A Contracorriente; Studies in Latin American Popular Culture; Romance Notes; and Letterature d’America, among others.