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, coloniality, extractivism, and infrastructure. She is currently working on a book-length project on 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). The book examines the role of photography as visual evidence of the destructive processes of infrastructure development and extractive capitalist expansion in the Amazon and outside the Brazilian metropole. Combining formal analysis of individual photographs with their inclusion in larger multi-media assemblages, Traces of the Unseen 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. Traces of the Unseen draws on works by Flavio de Barros, Euclides da Cunha, Roger Casement, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Mario de Andrade to situate an unruly photographic body at the center of modernity, in all its disputed meanings.
Carolina Sá Carvalho teaches courses on 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.