Thomaz Amancio researches and teaches Luso-Afro-Brazilian literatures and cultures. His work is particularly concerned with the dialogue between literature and the social sciences in connection to the countryside in Brazil. Other areas of interest include critical animal studies, the environmental humanities, and the cultural history of hunger.
Thomaz received a B.A. and an M.A. from Unicamp (Brazil) and a PhD in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies from the University of Chicago. He is a co-founder of the Saudade Working Group, an initiative that traces the connections between feeling and the transatlantic history of slavery and colonialism.
His current book project, Field Work: Labor, Race, and Culture in Rural Brazil, contends that field research in the plantation and the cattle frontier was a foundational practice of Brazilian cultural nationalism and social sciences. It offers an account of how the social relations of the plantation shaped and curtailed the political ambitions, conceptual imagination, and aesthetic attitude of major Brazilian intellectuals.
Recent Publications:
“Odd Partners: Antonio Candido and the Caipira Sharecropper,” Journal of Lusophone Studies, issue 9.2, 2026, pp. 148-168 (available here).
“Cattle Intimacies: Animal Voice and Literary Speech in João Guimarães Rosa and Marília Floôr Kosby,” in Plants and Animals in Latin American Cultural Production, edited by Oscar A. Pérez and Cristina E. Pardo Porto, University Press of Florida, 2026, pp. 95-110.
