Dr Lisa Shaw has been awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship for her project Tropical Travels and Transatlantic Dialogues’: Brazilian Popular Culture Abroad, 1870-1945.

The Fellowship will enable Dr Shaw to carry out archival research in Rio de Janeiro and to complete a book charting how popular cultural forms such as popular music, dance and the ‘teatro de revista’ (Brazil’s version of vaudeville) travelled to and from late 19th- and early 20th-century Brazil.

The project analyses the impact of these transnational, often transatlantic, movements and the encounters they generated, examining how Brazilian popular culture was shaped by its reception abroad, and by contact with local forms of popular cultural expression. It will consider how these transnational encounters prompted redefinitions of Brazilian identity through popular culture back in Brazil, particularly in relation to race and ethnicity.

Dr Lisa Shaw is Reader in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at the University of Liverpool. She is currently working on a book about Carmen Miranda for the BFI/Palgrave Macmillan’s ‘film stars’ series.

Image: Carmen Miranda in a scene from the Brazilian film ‘Banana da terra’ (Banana of the Land, 1939), produced by the Sonofilmes studio (courtesy of BBC Wales; reproduced with kind permission from Maria Byington, and with the technical assistance of Rosângela Sodré, CTAv, and Mauro Domingues, Labdigital, Arquivo Nacional, Rio de Janeiro).