skip to content
 

Prof Maite Conde

 

Position(s):  Lecturer in Brazilian Studies.

Professor of Brazilian Studies and Visual Culture.

Department/Section:  Spanish & Portuguese Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages Contact details:   

Telephone number:  +44 (0)1223 339 428 (Jesus)

Email address:  mc534@cam.ac.uk

College:  Jesus College

Location: 

Jesus College
Jesus Lane
Cambridge
CB5 8BL

About: 

Maite Conde’s research focuses on Brazilian culture, with a particular emphasis on cinema. Specifically, her work has engaged with questions concerning the relationship between cinema, literature and modernity in Brazil. This has involved a sustained examination of theoretical debates regarding the productive dialogue between film and literary modernism in the early 1900s, and discussions concerning cinema and modernity in Brazil’s First Republic. She is currently exploring how these theoretical and cinematic debates are figured in contemporary cinematic experiments in Brazil and the wider Lusophone world.

Maite's first book Consuming Visions. Cinema, Writing and Modernity in Rio de Janeiro (Virginia University Press, 2012), explores the relationship between cinema and writing in early twentieth-century Brazil, focusing on how the new and foreign medium of film was consumed by a literary society in the throes of modernization. This book was awarded an  Andrew Mellon/MLA award.

Her second book monograph, Foundational Films. Early Cinema and Modernity in Brazil (University of California Press, 2018) introduces readers to the crucial early years of cinema in Brazil, by looking at the arrival and dissemination of the medium in the modernizing period of the First Republic (1889-1930). Focusing on cinematic production, exhibition and dissemination during these years, Maite explores how the medium, in its broadest sense, was implicated in a larger project to transform Brazil into a modern nation. Analysing an array of cinematic forms, from actuality films, classical narrative movies, avant-garde productions, as well as fan magazines and ethnographic films and their intertexts, the book demonstrates the distinct ways in which Brazil’s early film culture helped to project and shape a new image of Brazil. This book was awarded a Robert and Meryl Selig Prize.

Maite is now working on two book manuscripts. The first Afterimages of the Revolution in Lusophone Cinema, uses recent debates in film studies regarding digital film, the archive and questions regarding cinematic time to examine contemporary documentary films made in Angola, Brazil, Mozambique and Portugal that use the cinematic archive to explore past revolutionary movements and moments and their cinematic manifestation and participation. This book is indebted to lectures and seminars Maite is currently teaching at Cambridge. The second book focuses on labour and cinema in Brazil, examining the ways in which film has been part of and recorded distinct kinds of work, including slave labour, industrial labour, domestic labour, digital labour and today’s precarious labour.

In addition to her work in film, Maite  also maintains an interest in Latin American social and cultural theory, and a particular interest in bringing key scholars into the Anglo American field. To this extent, she edited, translated and wrote the introduction to Between Conformity and Resistance(Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), a collection of key essays by renowned Brazilian philosopher Marilena Chauí. She also edited volume of essays by Brazilian film scholar Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes, Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes: On Brazil and Global Cinema (University of Wales Press, 2018). A further edited book project Manifesting Democracy? Urban Protest and the Politics of Representation in Brazil Post 2013 (Wiley Blackwell 2019) brings together Brazilian scholars and activists to examine the Brazilian protests of 2013 and their aftermath.

Maite has previously taught at Oxford University, King’s College London and Liverpool University, and in the United States, at Columbia University in New York and the University of California, Los Angeles. She has been awarded research fellowships at Oxford University (2004-2005) and at King’s College London (2009-2011) and in 2013 was research fellow at The University of São Paulo in Brazil.

Published works: 

Books

Foundational Films. Early Cinema and Modernity in Brazil (University of California Press, 2018)

Consuming Visions. Cinema, Writing and Modernity in Brazil(University of Virginia Press, 2012). 

Edited Collections

Manifesting Democracy. Politics, Urban Culture, and Public Space in Brazil. (Wiley Blackwell, 2019)

On Global Cinema and Brazil by Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes (University of Wales Press, 2018) 

Between Conformity and Resistance. Essays on Culture, Politics and the Statby Marilena Chauí. Edited Collection and Introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 

Selected Publications