Dr Georgia Nasseh
- Junior Research Fellow, King's College
Contact
Location
- Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics Raised Faculty Building University of Cambridge Sidgwick Avenue Cambridge CB3 9DA United Kingdom
About
Georgia is Research Fellow in the Literatures of the Global South at King’s College, Cambridge. After reading for a BA in English at Queen Mary, University of London (2013–2016) and an MSt in English at the University of Oxford (2016–2017), she completed a DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford in 2023. Her DPhil research was concerned with multilingualism and translationality, with an emphasis on the work of Angolan author José Luandino Vieira. More broadly, she has research interests in colonial and anticolonial literatures, transnationalism and internationalism, and Cold War aesthetics, as well as colonial and decolonial linguistics, multi-, pluri-, and translingualism, and literatures written in and across European and African languages.
As a Research Fellow at King's, she is exploring how performance companies, festivals, and the space of the theatre have operated as transnational sites of internationalist activity across Africa and the Americas between the 1960s and the 1980s, foregrounding the literary and intellectual production of Portuguese-speaking nations within comparative frameworks. She is currently organising an international conference, ‘Translation Networks in the Decolonising World, 1950s–1970s’, supported by the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), which will take place at King’s in April 2026.
She has recently held a Senior Lectureship in Portuguese and a Departmental Lectureship in Brazilian and African Portuguese at the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages. Between 2022–2024, Georgia also acted as Co-ordinator of the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation (OCCT) Research Centre, based at St Anne’s College, Oxford, where she organised the Centre’s activities and events — including seminars and panel discussions, workshops and conferences, international exchanges, in addition to the annual Oxford Translation Day — and contributed to the development of the Centre’s research agenda. In 2025, she acted as judge for the Stephen Spender Trust’s Portuguese Spotlight Prize.
Research
Research Interests: African Literature / Brazilian Literature / Translation Studies / Theatre and Performance Studies / Reception Studies
‘ “das prisões que […] me puseram nos pulsos”: José Luandino Vieira’s Critique of Colonial Education’, Portuguese Studies 42:1 [Forthcoming 2026]
Review of Revolutionary Movements in Africa: An Untold Story, edited by Pascal Bianchini, Ndongo Samba Sylla, and Leo Zeilig, The Global Sixties 18:1 (2025), 74–76 [Online]
‘The Spectre of Maksim Gorky: The Influence of Mother on Angola’s Geração Cultura’, in Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context, eds. Muireann Maguire and Cathy McAteer (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2024), pp. 329–348, with Mukile Kasongo [Open Access]
‘ “and I slip into it unawares”: The Function of Bilingualism in Kobina Sekyi’s The Blinkards (1915)’, Research in African Literatures 51:2 (Summer 2020), 135–148 [Online] Winner of the 2022 Abioseh Porter Best Essay Award
Teaching and supervision
Georgia teaches twentieth-century literature of Brazil, Portugal, and Portuguese-speaking Africa to undergraduate students as part of PG1: Introduction to the Language, Literatures and Cultures of the Portuguese-speaking World and PG4: Lusophone Culture, History and Politics. She has delivered lectures and supervisions on authors such as Fernando Pessoa, Patrícia Galvão (Pagu), Graciliano Ramos, Abdias Nascimento, Lygia Fagundes Telles, José Luandino Vieira, and Mia Couto. She is currently supervising Year Abroad Projects on Angolan revolutionary Deolinda Rodrigues, Afro-Brazilian poet and novelist Conceição Evaristo, and women’s religious lives in pre- and post-independence Mozambique. Georgia also supervises graduate core coursework and dissertations for the MPhil in Literature, Culture and Thought. At the Faculty of History, she lectures and supervises on topics related to Angola and Mozambique to undergraduate students as part of T19: Africa and the Global Cold War.
Before coming to Cambridge, Georgia taught at the University of Oxford across a range of language and literature modules. For students in Prelims, she taught ab initio and post A-Level Portuguese (i.e. oral, prose composition, and grammar), as well as prescribed authors of twentieth- and twenty-first century literature — such as Alda Lara, Clarice Lispector, and Pepetela — and Brazilian autos. For students in the Final Honours School, she taught nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first century literature of Brazil, Portugal, and Portuguese-speaking Africa, delivering lectures and tutorials on authors ranging from Machado de Assis, Aluísio Azevedo, and Mário de Andrade to Marilene Felinto, Conceição Evaristo, and Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa. She has also taught translation from Portuguese into English and English into Portuguese. At a graduate level, she taught on course options across the MSt in Modern Languages and the MSt in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and supervised dissertations on Angolan and Brazilian literature.