Leila Lehnen

Leila Lehnen is Associate Professor in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University. She specializes in contemporary Brazilian and Latin American literature and culture. Her research areas encompass the environmental humanities, extractivism, counter-colonial textualities and visualities, and Indigenous literatures and cultures. Additionally, she is interested in how cultural production can expand democratic imaginaries, counter different manifestations of authoritarianism, and confront the afterlives of coloniality. Her book, Citizenship and Crisis in Contemporary Brazilian Literature, examines the portrayal and critique of differentiated citizenship in contemporary Brazilian literature. She has published articles on, among other topics, ecocriticism, Indigenous literature, decoloniality, Afro-Brazilian literature, citizenship, and human rights within Brazilian and Latin American literature. Currently, she is completing a manuscript that attends to the intersection of Brazilian literature and democracy, focusing on various dimensions of democratic imaginaries, including environmental and Indigenous rights.