Afro-Brazilian Studies is an interdisciplinary field that examines the histories, cultures, and political struggles of people of African descent in Brazil, from slavery to the present, with particular attention to the African diaspora throughout the Lusophone world.
At the University of Michigan, the field has brought together literature, history, anthropology, and cultural studies to analyze how race, nation, and inequality have been shaped and contested by Black communities. The field also highlights the intellectual, artistic, and activist traditions through which Afro-Brazilians have reimagined identity, citizenship, and belonging.
Afro-Brazilian Studies Postdoctoral Fellow: Ryan B. Morrison
Originally from Philadelphia, Ryan B. Morrison received his Ph.D. in Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2023. Broadly speaking, his research examines Black social movements and cultural production in regions of the Americas marked by processes of whitening through European immigration and the forced displacement of racialized populations. He is interested in how canonical literature and dominant cultural formations construct these landscapes and their inhabitants, and how Black writers, artists, and activists remake those same imaginaries.
In his current book project, Prof. Morrison conceptualizes the Pampas as a transnational Black geography spanning Brazil’s southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul, Uruguay, and Argentina, a borderland that has held particular liberatory significance for Black communities in the region. Through what he terms the Afro-Pampas, he analyzes how this landscape at the limits of the nation has shaped Black ways of knowing and being in the 20th and 21st centuries, navigating both state recognition and refusal. Engaging writers, artists, and social movements across three national contexts, he explores how frontiers reconfigures relations between Black subjectivity, citizenship, and the state throughout the continent. During his time at Michigan, he also developed research on affirmative action policies and literature in Rio Grande do Sul, as well as on blackness, healing practices, and masculinity in the region’s literary production. He has published in peer-review journals such as the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Organon and Cadernos Afro Memória.
Prof. Morrison maintains an active translation agenda and is currently working on an English translation of Corsair in the Desert (Corsária, 2025) by Marilene Felinto, an award-winning Brazilian writer and journalist whose work critically engages issues of racism and poverty through a feminist lens. This project has been shortlisted and funded by English PEN Presents: Brazil, in partnership with the British Council. His translations from Portuguese and Spanish appear in the Journal of Lusophone Studies, Latin American Literature Today, and Vibrant: Virtual Brazilian Anthropology.
The commitments of Prof. Morrison’s research and translations are informed by his work as a community advocate for migrants and displaced peoples. He served as an interpreter with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and coordinated training for community interpreters working in family detention settings with the law school at Villanova University. He also taught Portuguese to staff and faculty in the South Portland, Maine public school system, developing a curriculum tailored to Angolan refugee students and their families. These experiences directly inform his reflections on forced migration, race, language and borders.
Teaching
Race and regionalism, gender and class have constituted central axes in his courses for undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Michigan, namely “Blackness in Brazil” and “Afro-Latin American Frontiers.” He has inflected his advanced Portuguese courses with the sociopolitical issues shaping language and cultural praxis in the Lusophone world: students debate topics ranging from pension reform in our unit on Ageism, to the Brazilian anti-asylum movement in concluding our study of Ableism.
One of the most salient units in his frontiers course places Afrofuturist critique in dialogue with Latin American nation-building processes and their resonances with the “final” frontiers of cosmic exploration. Students begin the unit by unpacking the notion of “raceless” futures within the mestizaje of nation-building projects, engaging thinkers such as José Martí, José Vasconcelos, Gilberto Freyre, and Manuel Zapata Olivella in dialogue with Afrofuturist critique. They then turn to literature and cinema to analyze how Afro–Latin American communities read the past in order to imagine future configurations of space and time. For instance, we discuss the poetry of Miriam Alves, the prose of Eliana Marques Cruz, and the film of Lázaro Ramos. These dystopian and speculative visions engage defining processes in the Afro-diasporic experience, from family separation, forced displacement, and deportation to marronage, belonging, revolution, and liberation.
While at Michigan, he expanded the teaching of Afro-Brazilian culture beyond the classroom by curating the exhibition Back in Bahia: The Repatriation Journey of Afro-Brazilian Art from Detroit to Salvador, held in the Weiser Hall gallery in February 2026. Additional details on the exhibition are provided below. In the weeks leading up to its opening, the repatriation process was completed and marked by an official event at MUNCAB featuring Margareth Menezes, the Brazilian Minister of Culture. Barbara Cervenka, one of the collection’s stewards in Detroit, passed away a few days later at the age of 86, having seen her wish fulfilled.
