Profile

Dylan Blau Edelstein is a PhD candidate in Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. His research draws from fields including disability studies and the medical humanities to investigate marginalized centers of modernist production in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds, with a primary focus on the intersections of artistic, literary, and psychiatric practices in 20th-century Brazil. 

Blau Edelstein’s academic writing and translations have appeared in journals in Brazil and the United States. He has presented his work at venues such as Weill Cornell Medicine’s Richardson Seminar on the History of Psychiatry, Brown University’s Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, and Princeton’s BrazilLAB. In 2018, he was a visiting researcher at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro’s Postgraduate Program in Sociology and Anthropology (PPGSA/UFRJ), supported by a Fulbright Scholarship to study the early career of pioneering psychiatrist and art therapist Nise da Silveira. He has taught language and culture courses at Princeton University and Rutgers University.

Since January 2024, he has been a Curatorial Fellow at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City, where he joined the curatorial team of the exhibition Madalena Santos Reinbolt: A Head Full of Planets (Feb.–May 2025). He can be heard discussing the exhibition on the Mar. 6, 2025 episode of the popular Brazilian podcast Rádio Novelo Apresenta, titled “Caminhos Cruzados.”