Profile
Dylan Blau Edelstein is a PhD Candidate in Princeton University’s Spanish and Portuguese Department, where his research investigates the crossings between the areas of literature, culture, the arts, and the history of psychiatric institutions in 20th-century Brazil. He also teaches language courses in both Spanish and Portuguese.
In 2018, Dylan was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to conduct research — as a visiting researcher at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro’s Postgraduate Program in Sociology and Anthropology (PPGSA/UFRJ) — on the early biography of the renown Brazilian psychiatrist and art-therapy pioneer Nise da Silveira. He has published the peer-reviewed article “Freudian Wordplay in Macunaíma” (Journal of Lusophone Studies, 2021). He also recently coauthored with Lilia M. Schwartz the article “A ‘Revolta dos Loucos’ de 1920: agência e insubordinação no Hospital Nacional de Alienados” (Revista Sociologia & Antropologia, soon to be published), which reconstructs the story of a patient-led revolt at Brazil’s National Insane Asylum in 1920.
Interests: Brazilian studies, Latin American studies, modernism, history of psychiatry, mental health, theater, gender and sexuality, translation
Education
B.A. in Spanish and Portuguese, with minors in Theater, Latin American Studies, and Ethnography (summa cum laude), Princeton University, 2017
Selected Publications
As a translator, Dylan has published a range of academic and creative works from Portuguese and Spanish into English, including:
- What is Psychoanalysis: For Beginners and Beyond..., book of essays by Fabio Herrmann. Collaborative translation with Fernanda Sofio Woolcott (accepted for publication by SUNY Press) (Work in Progress)
- “On Absence and Presence: The Images of Lima Barreto”, by Lilia M. Schwarcz (publication date TBD)
- “A Material World: On the Literary Invention of the Latin American Queer Body,” Javier Guerrero (Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Latin American Literary and Cultural Forms, 2022)
- “Sérgio Buarque de Holanda and His Raízes do Brasil: Myths and Identities in Brazilian Culture,” Pedro Meira Monteiro (Oxford University Press, 2020)
- “The Cordial Man: A Latin American Concept in the Brazilian Essay,” Pedro Meira Monteiro (Revista Brasileira de Literatura Comparada, 2020)
- “Bernardo, A Cat, and I,” short story by Jorge Ialanji Filholini, in Pandemonium: Nine Narratives Bridging São Paulo-Berlin
- Journalistic translations at Rio on Watch