Dr Vivien Kogut Lessa de Sá
- Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese
- Praeceptor at Corpus Christi College
Contact
Location
- Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages Raised Faculty Building University of Cambridge Sidgwick Avenue Cambridge CB3 9DA United Kingdom
About
Vivien Kogut Lessa de Sá is interested in comparative studies in Brazilian, Portuguese and English literatures, early colonial Brazil and early modern travel writing. Her research explores sixteenth-century cultural exchanges between Europe and the New World, with a focus on interactions between England, Portugal and Brazil.
She has previously taught at the University of Essex, at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) and at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). In 2015 she published a critical edition of one of the earliest descriptions of Brazil written by an Englishman (The Admirable Adventures and Strange Fortunes of Anthony Knivet: an English Pirate in Brazil, Cambridge University Presss). Her Portuguese translation of Knivet’s account was published in Brazil in 2007 (As Incríveis Aventuras e Estranhos Infortúnios de Anthony Knivet, Zahar Editores). More recently, Vivien published, with Sheila Hue, Ingleses no Brasil: relatos de viagem, 1526-1608 (Editora Chão, 2020), a collection of twelve English travel accounts to colonial Brazil, many of which are now published in Portuguese for the first time. She is also a published translator and poet.
Research
Published works:
“Images of Fear and Desire: the Brazilian ibirapema and indigenous women in the sixteenth-century European imagination,” Colnaghi Studies Journal, n. 16 (2025): 8-21.
“Mermaids, Amazons or Witches? Sixteenth-Century European Perceptions of Indigenous Brazilian Women,” in Women and Women’s World in the Eyes of Early Modern European Travelers, edited by Helena Sanson and Malgorzata Trzeciak-Cygan (London: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).
“As várias vidas da ibirapema: revisitando os primeiros encontros entre o Brasil e a Europa,” in Anais do Seminário de Estudos de Literatura, org. Karl Erik Schollhammer (Rio de Janeiro: Editora PUC-Rio, 2024)
“Dying in their own minds: firsting and lasting in the early Jesuit work with Tupi language in Brazil,” in Firsting in the Early Modern Atlantic World, edited by Lauren Beck (Routledge, 2020).
“Translation and prolepsis: the Jesuit origins of a Tupi Christian doctrine,” co-written with Caroline Egan, in Cultural Worlds of the Jesuits in Colonial Latin America, edited by Linda Newson (ILAS/University of London, 2020).
“English Pirates in Brazil: early Anglo-Portuguese relations in the New World,” co-written with Sheila Hue, in Transnational Portuguese Studies, edited by Hilary Owen and Claire Williams (Liverpool University Press, 2020).
“À Espera do Fim do Mundo na Companhia de Shakespeare,” in O Que Você Precisa Saber sobre Shakespeare Antes Que o Mundo Acabe, edited by Fernanda Medeiros and Liana Leão (Editora Nova Fronteira, forthcoming).
“Knivet, Anthony (1576-1649), traveller,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2018).
“O manuscrito roubado e o poeta elisabetano: encontros no Brasil do século dezesseis,” in Feminismos, identidades, comparativismos, edited by Fernanda T. de Medeiros (EDUERJ, 2014).