Spanish & Portuguese Faculty: Malcolm K. McNee

Assistant Professor
B.A. History and Spanish, University of Idaho
M.A. Latin American Studies, Tulane University

Ph.D. Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Linguistics, University of Minnesota

Malcolm McNee teaches interactive Portuguese language courses at all levels, including an intensive introduction designed for Spanish-speakers. He also teaches interdisciplinary humanities topics in Brazilian, Portuguese, Lusophone African, and Latin-American studies, including:

** Angola, Brazil, and Cuba: Race, Nation, and Narrative

** Brasil Profundo: Writing the Brazilian Countryside

** Envisioning Lusofonia: A Focus on Film from the Portuguese-Speaking World

** Popular Music, Nationhood, and Globalization in the Portuguese-Speaking World

Before completing his Ph.D. in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Linguistics at the U. of Minnesota in 2003, he completed an M.A. in Latin American Studies at Tulane U., and a B.A. in History and Spanish at the U. of Idaho. He also studied in Ecuador, at the Pontificia Universidad Católica, and in Portugal, at the Universidade de Lisboa.

His dissertation, “The Arts in Movement: Cultural Politics and Production in Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers Movement” analyzes poetry, music, performance, and cultural criticism produced and mediated by Brazil’s largest contemporary social movement. Articles building upon this work appear in The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies and Cadernos de Letras da Universidade Federal Fluminense, and a book chapter, “Soundtracking Landlessness” is forthcoming in Brazilian Popular Music and Citizenship, edited by Chris Dunn and Idelber Avelar. He was contributing editor to the multi-media website, The Sights and Voices of Dispossession: The Fight for the Land and the Emerging Culture of the MST. His other essays and book reviews appear in Romance Notes, A Contracorriente, La Revista Iberoamericana, Hispania, and Veredas: A Revista da Associação Internacional de Lusitanistas.

He is presently working on a book-length study of nature and rural place and subjectivity in contemporary Brazilian literature and visual culture. This project considers the meanings of the rural/regional in a rapidly urbanizing society, and environmental imagination in a literature that has not featured, as in the case of the U.S., a generic tradition of “nature writing”. He is also researching notions of racial and cultural hybridity in discourses of Lusophone transnational identity. In this vein, he co-edited a volume of essays, Gilberto Freyre e os estudos latino-americanos (IILI, 2006), and he is working on a series of essays on Angolan writer, José Eduardo Agualusa, whose work features crossings of Lusophone borders and for whom the notion of creolity connects Portuguese-speaking communities spread across oceans and continents.

In addition to his position in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, he serves on the advisory boards of Comparative Literature and Latin American and Latino/Latina Studies, and he has served as co-chair of the Five Colleges Afro-Luso-Brazilian Faculty Seminar. Along with his colleague, Marguerite Itamar Harrison, he serves as study-abroad advisor for programs in Brazil and Portugal.