Laura Rivas Gagliardi

I am a research associate at the Portuguese-Brazilian Institute of the University of Cologne.

After studying Portuguese and French Philology at the University of São Paulo (2007) and completing a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin (2013), I received my PhD there in 2019 as a fellow of the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies. As a postdoctoral researcher, I worked at the Institute of Latin American Studies in London and at the Departamento de Letras Modernas of the University of São Paulo, before moving to Cologne in 2021, where until 2024 I led a research project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) on the critical method of Mário de Andrade, Antonio Candido, and Roberto Schwarz.

My current research follows two lines: within my Habilitation project, I draw on the critical literary and social analysis of Antonio Candido and Roberto Schwarz to examine how and why female characters become crystallization points of literary social critique in the French novel of the nineteenth century and in its Spanish and Brazilian appropriations. The focus lies on the novels’ formal structure as an expression of the tension between the French model and the specific social realities into which it is transposed. In parallel, I am working on the life and work of the literary theorist Anatol Rosenfeld, rereading his exile-born thought from a comparatist perspective.