Join us on March 27th, 2025 at 5:30 pm at the Classics & Archaeology village (UNH 3700) for a presentation by Prof. Adriana Vasquez titled "Dido in a New World: Further Voices of the Feminine Indigene in Brazilian Arcadian Epic."

This talk is an excerpt of a monograph on the poetry of the Brazilian colonial period and its reception of antiquity, titled “Arcadia Ultramarina: Studies in the Neoclassical Literature of Portuguese America.” The talk considers the American feminine indigene as a site for epic’s ‘further voices’ in the two epics produced under the umbrella of 18th century Brazilian Arcadianism, each of which narrativizes key moments in the Portuguese settlement of Brazil. I argue that both epics allow for an alternative, indigenous tradition to be expressed, if only to demonstrate its suppression, whose presence is modelled on the Greco-Roman erotic and elegiac feminine.

Adriana Vazquez is an assistant professor of Classics at UCLA specializing in Latin literature of the Augustan period, with particular interest in its legacy in the Lusophone literature of the 17th- and 18th-centuries. She is currently working on a monograph on the legacy of Latin literature in the poetry of colonial Brazil, titled Arcadia Ultramarina: Studies in the Neoclassical Literature of Portuguese America, which analyzes the literary output of the poets of the Arcadia Ultramarina, a literary academy which emerged in colonial Brazil, for its dialoguing with the ancient poetic tradition. She has published articles on topics ranging from religious language in Augustan poetry to the legacy of Virgil in Portuguese epic and Brazilian poetry. She is a cofounder and former steering committee member of Hesperides: Classics in the Luso-hispanic World, an interest group focusing on Ibero-global reception.

The presentation will be followed by a reception. All are welcome!