Ph.D. Yale (1965). Professor of Portuguese, Brazilian and Lusophone African Literatures

After earning a B.A. from the University of Connecticut, an M.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and before receiving a Ph.D. at Yale, I spent two years (1960-62) in Brazil, where, as a Fulbright fellow, I studied at the University of Bahia, in the city of Salvador. In 1964 I joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota, where I spent twenty years. Although I teach the range of Portuguese-language literature, my research and publications focus on Brazil and especially Lusophone Africa. Both my teaching and writing combine textual analysis with a socio-linguistic and socio-historical approach. After publishing several articles on Brazilian subjects, including Afro-Bahian cultural expression, and such authors as Jorge Amado and Graciliano Ramos, I began to cultivate an interest in Lusophone African literature. In 1970-71, during a sabbatical year in Lisbon, I carried out research for a book on the literature of the five then Portuguese colonies in Africa. It was also during that year that I made the first of my now many trips to Africa. With the help of the Gulbenkian Foundation grant I visited, in August of 1971, Angola, Cape Verde, and Mozambique, where I carried out research for my book, titled Voices from an Empire: A History of Afro-Portuguese Literature, published in 1975. A grant from the Social Research Council allowed me to spend my 1978-79 sabbatical in four of the five, by then independent countries of Lusophone Africa, where I did research for Literatura Africana, Literatura Necessária, a two-volume study published in Lisbon in 1981 (v.1) and 1983 (v.2). Throughout the sixteen years I served as Dean of Vanderbilt's Graduate School I was able to teach an occasional course and maintain a research agenda. Now that I am again a full-time member of the faculty, my immediate plans include a revised and updated edition of my two-volume book. I also plan to write a book on my social, intellectual, and cultural experiences in Brazil, Portugal, Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé e Príncipe.