Daniel Da Silva
Assistant Professor, Portuguese, Rutgers University – New Brunswick
Daniel da Silva’s research specializes in gender, sexuality, race, performance and popular music in the Portuguese-speaking world. His forthcoming book, Trans Tessituras: Transatlantic and Transgender Luso-Afro-Brazilian Popular Music analyzes popular music iterations of transgender voices in Brazil, Portugal and Angola to show how they amplify and refigure the gendered conventions of Portuguese-language popular music genres by pulling at national and transatlantic histories of race, gender and sexuality. A second manuscript, Favela Feminism, will show how feminism in Brazil is connected to the histories, work and desires of black, Afro-Brazilian cis, trans, and gender-nonconforming women through favela cultural practices. He received his Ph.D. in Latin American and Iberian Cultures from Columbia University in 2019, as well as a Certificate in Feminist Scholarship from the Institute of Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality in 2016. Coming to Rutgers University – New Brunswick is a homecoming of sorts, after receiving a B.A. in History with a minor in Lusophone World Cultures at Rutgers University – Newark in 2012. Da Silva’s interests in music, Lusophone cultures, and queer performance were cultivated through his youth growing up in Newark, NJ’s Ironbound neighborhood, as a performer of music, and during a decade working in New York’s music industry scenes. These experiences continue to inform his interest in popular gay, trans, queer and feminist performance.
SELECT PUBLICATIONS
2018
“Unbearable Fadistas: António Variações and Fado as Queer Praxis.” Journal of Lusophone Studies 3.1(2018): pp. 124-147.
2019
“Black Mothers and Black Boats: Queer, Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian Intersections in Ney Matogrosso’s ‘Mãe Preta (Barco Negro).’” Journal of Lusophone Studies 4.1(2019): pp. 208-229.
“Transgender Voices: Anhoni’s Vanishing Woods, Bodies and Breath,” Out & About Blog, Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, May 8.http://irwgs.columbia.edu/out-and-about-transgender-voices-of-vanishing-woods-bodies-and-breath/
Working Group Affiliation
Queer Aqui, Project Director