Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Fields of Study
- Modern and Contemporary Hispanic Literatures and Cultures
Areas of Interest
- Photography, Film, Media, and Visual Culture;
- Environmental Humanities;
- Infrastructure;
- Critical and cultural studies;
- Luso-Afro-Brazilian literatures and cultures;
- Latin American Studies;
Biography
Carolina Sá Carvalho writes about modern Latin American arts, photography, film, and literature, with a focus on Brazil, environmental humanities, infrastructure, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. She is currently working on a book-length project examining mosquitoes and the aesthetics and politics of contagion in 20th and 21st-century Brazil.
She is the author of Traces of the Unseen: Photography, Violence, and Modernization in Early Twentieth-Century Latin America (Northwestern UP, 2023), which received the Roberto Reis First Book Award from the Brazilian Studies Association and Best Book Awards from the Latin American Studies Association's sections on Environment, Amazonia, and Visual Culture Studies. The book was also shortlisted for the Modern Language Association First Book Prize. Traces of the Unseen examines the role of photography as visual evidence of the destructive processes of infrastructure development and extractive capitalist expansion in the Amazon and beyond the Brazilian metropole. Combining formal analysis of individual photographs with their inclusion in larger multi-media assemblages, the book explores how photographs of violence were framed, captioned, cropped, and circulated to develop singular pedagogies of the gaze and teach increasingly interconnected urban publics how to interpret them within the larger context of capitalist modernization.
She is the coordinator of the SSHRC IG-funded Mosquito Network [Rede Mosquito], an interdisciplinary network that investigates the role of mosquitoes in the perception, construction, and history of cities across scales.
Carolina Sá Carvalho teaches courses on Latin American and Luso-Afro-Brazilian arts, film, literature, and cultures. At the graduate level she teaches a variety of seminars such as the Politics and Aesthetics of Multispecies Contagion, Latin American Visual Culture, and Home and Dwelling in Latin America.
Before joining the University of Toronto, she was a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.