Dr Claire Williams

I am Fellow and Tutor in Portuguese at St Peter’s College and a member of the Sub-Faculty of Portuguese (Modern and Medieval Languages), where I am Associate Professor of Brazilian Literature and Culture. I came to Oxford in 2009 after teaching for eight years at the University of Liverpool. My doctoral thesis focused on the works of the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, and I still teach and write about her. I am fascinated by the variety of novels and films that come out of Brazil and keen to promote Brazilian culture as much as possible – there’s a lot more going on than football, samba and favelas.

I organise the University’s annual Brazil Week which celebrates the fact that there are so many academics and students at the University of Oxford who are working in and on Brazil, and to bring them together. I have set up a link with BBC Brasil for my students to contribute to a blog about their adventures on their year abroad. Along with my colleague Dr Jason Stanyek, from the Music Faculty and St. John’s, I’ll be running a TORCH Network group called ‘Global Brazil’.

I was President of Wisps (Women in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies) from 2006 to 2009 and the General Secretary of ABIL (Association of British and Irish Lusitanists) from 2009 to 2013. I am the Portuguese representative on the Steering Committee of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing, based at the Institute for Modern Languages Research at the University of London.

Undergraduate teaching

I lecture on Modern literature from the Portuguese-speaking world (from Machado de Assis to Conceição Evaristo) and teach other courses such as Brazilian Cinema and Contemporary Brazilian Literature. I also team teach on courses such as Lusophone African Literature, Women’s Writing in Lusophone literature and Latin American Cinema.