Profile

Luís Augusto Fischer is an eminent scholar of Brazilian literature and culture and Professor of Literature at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil. An award-winning author, he has published over twenty books of literary critique and fiction, as well as multiple edited volumes, with a focus on the interface of literature and history and decolonial approaches. Fischer is also an engaged public intellectual, addressing contemporary artistic and sociocultural issues in Brazil’s major media outlets.

Throughout his distinguished career, Fischer has published numerous annotated editions of Brazilian classics, including the novels of Machado de Assis (also published in Portugal), Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands) by Euclides da Cunha, and Macunaíma by Mário de Andrade. Challenging the very idea of a national Brazilian literature, Fischer is committed to recuperating the creative works of frontier authors, such as Simões Lopes Neto, and to finding resonances between groundbreaking writers such as Machado de Assis and Jorge Luis Borges.

Fischer’s multi-genre creative work opens up new critical horizons that challenge traditional master narratives and invite readers to a more inclusive dialogue with a pulse on the inequalities that mark Brazil past and present. In his acclaimed book Two Formations, One History: From Ideas Out of Place to Amerindian Perspectivism (Arquipélago 2021), Fischer takes the social history of the country’s plantations and backlands to rethink the very idea of a Brazilian literature. His most recent book, The Modernist Ideology (Todavia 2022), challenges the enthronement of the São Paulo-born modernism in Brazil’s artistic imagination, dismantling national myths in a tour de force about literature, history, and the politics of memory.

Fischer has worked in various cultural offices in southern Brazil and is the past president of the Rio Grande do Sul Association of Writers. He was a Fellow at the University Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle and a Visiting Professor at the Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Argentina. He writes chronicles and essays for the newspapers Folha de São Paulo and Zero Hora and is the founder of the online magazine Parêntese.

During his Princeton Visiting Professorship, Fischer will be teaching the graduate seminar “Insurgent Writings in Brazil” in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and making inroads into his research on orality and the place of popular music in a new history of literature in Brazil.