Professor Maite Conde

Fellow, Tutor, Director of Studies in Modern & Medieval Languages (Part IA)
University Positions
Professor of Brazilian Studies and Visual Culture
Specialising in
Brazilian studies

Maite Conde is Professor of Brazilian Studies and Visual Culture and a Fellow of Jesus College. She is Director of Studies for Modern & Medieval Languages (Part IA).

Academic interests

Maite Conde's academic interests include:

  • Latin American literature and culture
  • Cinema, especially world cinema
  • Spanish American and Brazilian film
  • Brazilian literature and culture
  • Modern Latin American culture
  • Lusophone African cinema and literature
  • Postcolonial theory.

Degrees obtained

  • MA Hons, Glasgow.
  • MA, London.
  • MA, Cantab.
  • PhD, University of California, Los Angeles.

Biography

Maite Conde’s research focuses on Latin American culture, with a particular emphasis on film and literature. More specifically her work engages with questions concerning the relationship between cinema and modernity in Brazil. She also has a sustained interest in social and cultural theory from Latin America as well as postcolonial theory as it pertains to Latin America and the Lusophone, including Lusophone African, world.  

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.

In addition to teaching for the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Cambridge, Maite is a core member of the Film and Screen Studies MPhil programme at Cambridge and is an affiliate of the Centre of Latin American Studies at Cambridge, where she teaches on the graduate programme.  

She has been awarded research fellowships at Oxford University from 2004 to 2005 and at King’s College London from 2009 to 2011. In 2013 she was research fellow at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. In 2018 she received the Katherine Singer Kovacs award by the Modern Language Association for her book Foundational Films.

Other interests

Scuba diving, running, tennis, and travel.

Department link

http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/

Publications, links and resources

Foundational Films: Early Cinema and Modernity in Brazil (2018) examines the arrival and dissemination of film in Brazil, looking at the role the new medium played in forging the foundations of a new modern nation state, following the abolition of slavery in the country and the start of the First Republic (1889-1930). This book received the Katherine Singer Kovacs award for an outstanding book published in English or Spanish in the fields of Spanish or Latin American Literatures and cultures by the Modern Language Association. It also received an honourable mention for the Antonio Candido award for the best book on Brazil by the Latin American Studies Association, and was a finalist for the Richard Wall Memorial Prize by the Theatre and Film Library Association.

Consuming Visions. Cinema, Writing and Modernity in Rio de Janeiro (2012) explores the relationship between cinema and writing in early 20th century Brazil, focusing on how the new and foreign medium of film was consumed by a literary society in the throes of modernization. The book was awarded an Andrew Mellon award by the Modern Language Association in 2014.

Maite has also edited the following books: 

  • Between Conformity and Resistance (2011).
  • Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes: On Brazil and Global Cinema (2018).
  • Manifesting Democracy? Urban Protest and the Politics of Representation in Brazil Post 2013 (2020).

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