Supervisor, Portugese Program Cris Lira holds a Ph.D. and a M.A. in Romance Languages from the University of Georgia. She specializes in Contemporary Brazilian Literature. Her research interests are mostly related to contemporary Brazilian and Latin American literature and culture with an interdisciplinary and comparative approach. She is interested in women's writing, the connection between representations of female characters and violence, exile aesthetics, and post dictatorship, gender and memory studies. Her articles have been published in Revista Iberoamericana, Chasqui, Revista Mulheres e Literatura, among other journals. In 2022, she co-edited the bilingual collection of poems (Portuguese/English) Raízes: Brazilian Women Poets in Translation, published by Venas Abiertas publishing house. Cris Lira is also a creative writer. Her most recent book, Fragmentos do interior (2021), is part of the third Mulherio das Letras (Women of Letters) collection of single-authored books published by Editora Venas Abiertas. In 2020, she published O mundo é esse lugar (The World is Such a Place) as part of the second Mulherio das Letras collection of single-authored books. Her previous books, No país da infância (My Childhood Country) and Ponte para o poente (Bridge to the Sunset) were both published in 2019 as part of the first Mulherio das Letras collection, which was a finalist of the prestigious Brazilian literary award Jabuti in 2020. Some of her short stories and poems have appeared in collections such as iBasta! 100+Latinas Against Gender Violence (University of Nevada Press, 2017) and Mulherio pela paz (ABR, 2018).
