Victoria Adams

Profile

I joined the University of Leeds in October 2024 as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. While at Leeds, I will investigate the impact of Pontos de Cultura, or pre-existing community groups granted funding and multimedia equipment by the Brazilian government, 20 years after their introduction. I will collaborate with those involved in the Pontos de Cultura to consider how this seminal cultural policy’s efforts to democratise access to cultural funding in Brazil have affected geographies and conceptions of cultural production in the country. I will also ask what my collaborators’ experiences contribute to discussion in places like the UK where cultural institutions are concentrated in select regions and governments are making efforts to ‘level up’ opportunities.

Before joining the University of Leeds, I was Research Associate on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project ‘Contesting Algorithmic Racism in Brazil through Digital Cultures’ at the University of Bristol (November 2023-July 2024). As part of this project, I worked with Brazil-based artists and activists to discover how they navigate and contest the various forms of bias that are present in digital technologies and online spaces.

This postdoctoral research built on my PhD’s exploration of digital media’s role in remapping the space of the city and state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Based at the University of Cambridge and funded by the Cambridge Trust, my doctoral research employed qualitative methods to examine how and why a range of cultural-historical projects (including an Instagram page, virtual museum, and memory tourism app) use digital media to explore Rio’s past. Submitted in 2022, the resulting thesis argues that although engagement with digital media plays a central role in shaping perceptions of Rio, historical, social and economic factors condition the ways in which cultural producers can use digital technologies to explore the past of the city and state. I was awarded an Association of Hispanists of Great Britain & Ireland (AHGBI) Publication Prize for this thesis in 2023. As a recipient of this prize, my thesis will be published as a monograph entitled Digital Media, Memory and Heritage in Contemporary Rio de Janeiro: Reproducing the Past for the Present with Legenda.

Beyond my research, I have lectured and supervised on Lusophone culture at the University of Cambridge. I have also taught translation classes that draw on my experience of translating works from Portuguese to English for publication in academic journals and publishers. Having worked as work as the Spanish and Portuguese Specialist at the Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics Library of the University of Cambridge (October 2022-October 2023), I maintain a keen interest in library and information studies.

Research interests

My research primarily examines the intersections of cultural policy and digital culture in Brazil. I also engage with the fields of cultural studies, urban studies, memory studies and heritage studies as they relate to Brazil and Latin America more broadly.

Qualifications

• PhD in Portuguese, University of Cambridge
• MPhil in Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge
• BA in Hispanic Studies and Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, King's College London

Professional memberships

• Association of Hispanists of Great Britain & Ireland (AHGBI)
• Rede Europeia de Brasilianistas de Analise Cultural (REBRAC)
• Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy