Turn to Amazonia: A Polycultural Aesthetics

Marina Bedran is an assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese. She works on literature, visual culture, media studies, ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities. Her current book project is an interdisciplinary study of the artistic turn to Amazonia in postwar Brazil. The book examines the work of Brazilian and Brazil-based artists between the 1950s and the late 1980s, showing how they experimented with innovative aesthetic forms that heed Amazonia and, in so doing, articulated a critique of developmentalism and proposed new ways of thinking about indigeneity, the environment, and the more-than-human.

Her first book, A aventura do estilo: ensaios e correspondência de Henry James e Robert Louis Stevenson, is an examination of the correspondence between Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson, which she translated into Portuguese. It was published in Brazil with Editora Rocco in 2017 and shows how this unlikely dialogue impacted their poetics and modern literature more broadly.

She received her Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese from Princeton University, where she was awarded a Lassen Fellowship from the Program in Latin American Studies – PLAS (2014–15) and a Dissertation Fellowship from the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies ­– PIIRS (2019–20). She also has a master’s degree in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the University of São Paulo – USP.

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