Professor Claire Williams

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

For ten years now, Claire has organised 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.

Claire 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. She is the Portuguese representative on the Steering Committee of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing (CCWW), based at the Institute for Languages, Cultures and Societies at the University of London, where she edits the Portuguese Author Pages. Claire is co-organising a series of events on the theme of ‘The Business of Women’s Writing’ for the CCWW in 2026. She sits on the Editorial Board of several academic journals, including Portuguese Studies, the Journal of Lusophone Studies, estudos de literatura brasileira contemporânea, and the Bulletin of Contemporary Hispanic Studies.

Undergraduate teaching

Claire lectures on Modern Literature from the Portuguese-speaking world (from Machado de Assis and Aluísio de Azevedo to Conceição Evaristo and Luiz Ruffato) and teaches other courses such as Brazilian Cinema and Contemporary Brazilian Fiction. Claire also collaborates with colleagues from the Portuguese and Spanish Sub-Faculties on courses such as Lusophone Women’s Literature and Latin American Cinema.