Luciana Villas Bôas is Professor of Anglo-Germanic Languages at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and at the Graduate Program of Germanic Languages at the Universidade de São Paulo. She is the author of Wilde Beschriftungen. Brasiliens historische Semantik in der Frühen Neuzeit (2017), A República de chinelos. Bolsonaro e o desmonte da representação (2022), and several articles on Early Modern representations of the New World in both literature and art. She is currently writing a book titled Writing Dissent: Hans Staden’s Book and Early Colonialism. She has also translated the works of Reinhart Kosselleck, Jürgen Habermas, and Hannah Arendt into Portuguese.
On Friday, November 17, Prof. Villas Bôas will speak on “The Dramaturgy of Power: Lula’s Inauguration and the Storming of Brasília from an Early Modern Perspective.” In this lecture, Prof. Villas Bôas considers how Brazil’s modernist capital recently served as a stage for events that have changed the way we understand the foundations and the future of democracy. Lula’s presidential inauguration (January 1st, 2023) and the storming of the esplanade (January 8th, 2023) yielded powerful images that have redefined the political intelligibility of our present. In this lecture, Prof. Villas Bôas demonstrates how these two events reveal democracy’s fictitious institutional design. Taking inspiration from Shakespeare’s and Hobbes’ views of the intrinsic theatricality of power, she explores how the events in Brazil challenge us to rethink the work of institutions in the enactment of representative democracy.
On Saturday, November 18, Prof. Villas Bôas will lead an interdisciplinary workshop, “Persona, Publicity, and Power: A Transhistorical Exploration.” This workshop will be divided into two sessions. The morning session (10 am – 12 pm) will focus on texts by William Shakespeare, Thomas Hobbes, Ernst Kantorowicz, and Cornelia Vismann. The afternoon session (1 pm – 3 pm) will feature presentations by Marden Nichols (Classics, Georgetown University), Aleksandra Prica (Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, UNC), Hérica Valladares (Classics, UNC), and Ellen Welch (Romance Studies, UNC). This workshop is free and open to the public, but space is limited. All interested are asked to RSVP by sending an email to Hérica Valladares (hericav@email.unc.edu) by Monday, November 13.
