The Department is pleased to announce that, on Monday, November 11th,聽Marcus Avelar successfully defended his dissertation,聽entitled 鈥淯rban Spirits: Language, Race, and Modernity among Umbandistas in S茫o Paulo, Brazil.鈥� Committee members characterized the dissertation as a 鈥減age turner,鈥� which speaks to the elegance with which Marcus was able to wage an innovative argument regarding ideologies of language, race, and hybridity in Brazil. Marcus is pictured at right, along with his dissertation chair, Prof. Kira Hall, and the other members of his committee (Jeremy Calder,聽Natasha Shrikant,聽Anna Bentes, and聽Carla Jones).聽
Marcus has taken a prestigious postdoctoral position at Florida International University's聽, where he is working on the implementation of the vision of the Center and on new research related to Brazilian identity in South Florida. In his postdoc, Marcus is investigating the question of how Brazilianness figures in local constructions of Latinidad, how Brazilians orient to South Florida鈥檚 Spanish-English bilingualism, and to questions of Spanish-English-Portuguese language contact. Marcus is supervised by Dr. Phillip Carter, a sociolinguist who specializes on Spanish in the Miami area.
Congratulations to the newly minted Dr. Marcus Avelar!