Romance Languages Colloquium

The Romance Languages Colloquium is a series of free, open to the public events organized by graduate students of the Department. The spirit of the event is to share our department’s work with the community, making us more aware of what our colleagues do and giving us the opportunity of talking to about our production.

Hunting Shadows: Resisting Displacement Trauma Leveraging Archives

Okikiola Olusanu is a current graduate student (Ph.D.) at the University of Georgia, Athens, and a dedicated researcher with specialization in African Women’s Writings in postcolonial Africa, particularly sub-Saharan Africa with focus on the eƯect of colonial legacies on gender, identity, and the African woman’s status. She is committed to the deconstruction of colonial knowledge, space, identity and every other factor aƯected by Western constructs. She has presented works both on Gender and postcolonial issues and on archives, within the University of Georgia. Her recent work focuses on the immortal trauma from colonial past leveraging archives as a curative and reconstruction tool through the intersection of memory, history, and identity.

Engaging with Locals: Pernambucanidade and Local Film Revisited in the Cinema of Kleber Mendonça Filho

Luiz Roberto Farias is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Georgia, specializing in Brazilian cinema and literature from the state of Pernambuco, Brazil. He wrote the preface to Agá (2019), a novel by Hermilo Borba Filho, and participated in the Romance Languages Colloquium – Academic Year 2024-2025 documentary A Prática da Anarquia: Uma Leitura de Sobrados e Mocambos, directed by the acclaimed Brazilian filmmaker Hilton Lacerda. Farias holds an M.A. in Theory of Literature from the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco. In addition to his academic pursuits, he studied classical guitar and double bass at the Conservatório Pernambucano de Música and performs both Brazilian and American music.