Laura Rivas Gagliardi

I work comparatively on writing in French, Spanish and Portuguese from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. In research and teaching I work on women’s authorship, on narrative theory, and on realism in Brazil, France and Spain, always from the perspective of a social history of literary forms. My interests extend to the writing of literary history in the nineteenth century and to literary criticism in the twentieth. In my archival work on multilingual estates I trace the transfer of knowledge between the German-speaking and the Romance worlds. I am currently a visiting researcher at the Portuguese-Brazilian Institute of the University of Cologne, where I am preparing my Habilitation.

My Habilitation project carries the working title Licentia. Women’s Speech and Critical Knowledge in Marguerite de Navarre and María de Zayas. In it I study the great novella collections of the early modern Romance world written by women. I pay particular attention to the spaces in which women narrate and judge: the cadre of the Heptaméron and Zayas’s sarao. The title term has a double history: in the rhetorical tradition, licentia names the freedom to speak before those one must revere or fear; in early modern daily life, licencia is the permission that subordinates of every kind had to obtain — and a woman was almost always somebody’s subordinate. My question lies between these two meanings: who may take the floor, before whom, and with what claim to truth? What becomes of such spaces when the nineteenth-century novel occupies them anew, now as salon or tertulia, has been the subject of my courses and of essays on women characters.

From 2021 to 2024 I directed a DFG-funded research project at the University of Cologne on my own position (Eigene Stelle), devoted to the critical method of Mário de Andrade, Antonio Candido and Roberto Schwarz. What interested me was how a criticism arose in Brazil that reads literary form as social process. The project produced the German edition of Roberto Schwarz’s Ein Meister an der Peripherie des Kapitalismus, which I edited, and the volume Roberto Schwarz Beyond Borders, which I co-edited.

Out of that work in turn grew my engagement with the literary scholar Anatol Rosenfeld: trained in Berlin, in São Paulo he became a central figure of Brazilian criticism. I reread him from a comparatist perspective, drawing on his archives at the Casa do Povo in São Paulo and in Germany. Along the way I discovered a colleague of Rosenfeld’s: the German sociologist Irmgard Lang, a scholar of Brazilian subjects until then entirely overlooked by scholarship. Her career and her work I was able to reconstruct for the first time in the Mainz University Archive and the Federal Archive in Koblenz.

My doctoral work examines the literary-political project of the Viennese Romance philologist Ferdinand Wolf, whose Le Brésil littéraire of 1863 is the first history of Brazilian literature, written in German and printed in French. In Wolfenbüttel, Vienna and Rio de Janeiro I located and edited the documents of its genesis. They refute the Brazilian consensus that the book was commissioned by Emperor Pedro II, and show instead the incorporation of Brazilian literature into the Habsburg project of colonial expansion.

I studied in São Paulo and in Berlin: Portuguese and French philology at the University of São Paulo, then Applied Literary Studies and a doctorate (2019) at the Freie Universität Berlin. As a postdoctoral researcher I worked at the Institute of Latin American Studies in London and at the University of São Paulo, before joining the University of Cologne in 2021.