Faculty and graduate students from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese’s Portuguese-Speaking World Studies program were well represented at the XVIII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA), held at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) in Salvador, Brazil, in July 2026. BRASA’s international congress is a major gathering for scholars of Brazil, bringing together researchers from Brazil and around the world.
Professor Isis Barra Costa and doctoral students Jean Carlos Carniel and Maria Vitória de Rezende Grisi participated in the conference through book events and research presentations.
Barra Costa and Grisi took part in the inaugural Author Meets Readers, a new BRASA initiative dedicated to recently published books. The session featured Barra Costa’s Imagining the Past, Remembering the Future: Forms of Knowledge in the Afro-Brazilian Diaspora (Columbia University Press, 2026), with Grisi serving as moderator.
All three OSU participants also presented their research in different conference panels. 
Grisi presented work on the continuities between medieval Andalusian poetic forms and the oral and popular traditions of Northeastern Brazil, combining literary history, translation, and digital cartography.
Carniel presented his research on Brazilian horror cinema and the ways Gothic conventions are mobilized to represent the ghosts of slavery and the persistence of historical violence in contemporary Brazil.
Barra Costa participated in a panel honoring Brazilian philosopher and scholar Denise Ferreira da Silva, whose work brings an anticolonial Black feminist perspective to questions of raciality, modern thought, ethics, and aesthetics.
Together, their contributions showcased the breadth of research in Portuguese-Speaking World Studies at Ohio State and the program’s ongoing engagement with scholars and institutions throughout Brazil.
Photo: From left, Jean Carlos Carniel, Professor Isis Barra Costa, and Maria Vitória de Rezende Grisi at BRASA XVIII in Salvador, Brazil, July 2026.