Thomaz Amancio received his PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago in 2024. His dissertation was awarded the Best Dissertation prize by LASA Brazil in 2025. He specializes on the written archive of the countryside in Latin America, with a focus on Brazil. Dwelling on the intersection of aesthetics and social science, this corpus defines a throughline of Brazilian intellectual and cultural history in the 20th century, cementing core ideas about racial and cultural identity, nature and landscape, and political and economic organization. Amancio’s manuscript, entitled “Field Work: Labor and Culture in Rural Brazil,” historicizes field research in the countryside as an epistemic and aesthetic practice informed by class. The book tracks the emergence of ways of engaging rural realities which, born in the plantation, shaped scientific and cultural institutions and the university. Amancio’s research interests also extend to the representation of animals, plants, and spirits, especially as it pertains to contemporary environmental and social concerns. His work has been published in philia, Revista Porto Alegre, Topoi, the Journal of Lusophone Studies, and the forthcoming volume Plants and Animals in Latin American Cultural Production (University Press of Florida, 2026).
Education
BA, Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp), 2013
MA, Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp), 2017
PhD, University of Chicago, 2024
Selected Publications
- “Odd Partners: Antonio Candido and the caipira sharecropper”, Journal of Lusophone Studies (forthcoming)
- “Cattle Intimacies: Animal Voice and Literary Speech in João Guimarães Rosa and Marília Floôr Kosby”, in Plants and Animals in Latin American Cultural Production, edited by Oscar A. Pérez and Cristina E. Pardo Porto, University Press of Florida (2026)
- “Representar o Antropoceno”, review of Erin James’s Narrative in the Anthropocene (Ohio State University Press, 2022), Topoi Revista de História (available here).
- “Santo Antonio Candido, Intérprete do Brasil”, Revista Porto Alegre (available here)
Recent Courses in RLL
- PORT 12200 Portuguese for Spanish Speakers (Spring 2021)
- PORT 27200 Introduction to Brazilian Culture (Spring 2025)
- SPAN 10300 Beginning Elementary Spanish III (Autumn 2024)
- SPAN 20100 Language, History, and Culture I (Winter 2021, 2025)
- SPAN 22323 Animals in Latin American Literature and Film (Winter 2023)