The International Seminar 2025 - Machado de Assis: A Life in Literature will convene at the Council on Latin American & Iberian Studies at the Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut from 10 to 11 October 2025. The Yale Seminar will bring together students, researchers, writers, and translators from universities on three or more continents to address questions of theme, philosophy, style, narratology and translation in Machado’s diverse writings in narrative prose, poetry, theater, criticism, journalism, and correspondence. Among the conference committee members is Dalkey Archive’s author, João Almino.
The principal objective of the seminar is to stimulate and further the reception of the literary works of Machado de Assis in international comparative literature and world literature through study of his literary language, the aesthetic texture of his portraits of Brazilian society, his unrelenting irony, and his assimilation of a world of literature into texts that, beginning in 1880, surprise the reader with their experimental, open modernity.
The 2025 International Seminar on Machado de Assis: A Life in Literature will convene in person on the Yale University campus. Please reach out to latin.america@yale.edu if you have any questions.
Conference Committee
K. David Jackson, Yale University
João Almino, Academia Brasileira de Letras
Paul Dixon, Purdue University
Earl E. Fitz, Vanderbilt University
Hélio de Seixas Guimarães, Universidade de São Paulo
José Luís Jobim, Universidade Federal Fluminense
João Cezar Castro Rocha, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro
Sonia Netto Salomão, Universitàs Degli Studi Di Roma La Sapienza
Brazilian novelist, critic, and diplomat João Almino is the author of three volumes of essays and five of philosophy, in addition to the five novels of his Brasilia Quintet, of which Dalkey has published the last two, The Book of Emotions and Free City. He has taught at Berkeley, Stanford, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the University of Brasilia, and the University of Chicago. Among other awards, Almino won the 2003 Casa de las Américas Award for The Five Seasons of Love and the 2011 Prêmio Passo Fundo Zaffari and Bourbon de Literatura for Free City. In 2017, he was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters. The Last Twist of the Knife is his seventh novel.