Ana Claudia Sao Bernardo

Ana Cláudia São Bernardo (she/they) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies and the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She obtained her PhD from the UMN’s Spanish and Portuguese Department. Ana is an Afro-Brazilianist and Latin Americanist Cultural Studies scholar committed to social and racial justice. Her publications explore the work of women writers from Brazil and the Black Diaspora.

She is committed to Black Diaspora Studies, Black Geographies, Black Studies, Black Feminist epistemologies, Third World and women-of-color feminisms, and postcolonial theory. Her current book project, titled “From the Dumpster to the Bookshelf: Black Women Writers and The Quest for Mobility in Brazil,” explores how literature can challenge spatial divisions and redefine authorship. Through close reading, theoretical, and contextual analysis, she argues that literature can re/create spaces and redefine who can be considered an author and under what circumstances. She reflects on how Black women authors develop epistemic spaces that others can occupy and expand for the cultivation and sharing of knowledge. She has published works on Louva Deusas, an independent collective of Afro-Brazilian women writers, focusing on their representations of spirituality and sexuality. Additionally, she published on the international representation of Afro-Brazilian author Carolina Maria de Jesus in the 1960s, Black subjectivity in the work of Afro-Puerto Rican author Mayra Santos-Febres, and race in post-colonial Mozambique.

Before returning to the University of Minnesota – where Ana obtained a PhD from the Spanish and Portuguese Department – Ana worked at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Providence College. Her work was also supported by the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change at the University of Minnesota and the Zemurray-Stone Postdoctoral Fellowship in Latin American Studies at Tulane University.

Ana is also affiliated faculty in the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC).