David Treece received his BA in Hispanic Studies (1982) and his PhD in Brazilian literature (1987) from the University of Liverpool. Between 1984 and 1987 he worked for the human rights NGO Survival International, campaigning in defence of Brazil’s indigenous communities. After a year lecturing at the University of Glasgow, in 1987 he joined the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at King’s, serving as its Head of Department from 2002 to 2005. He was appointed Professor of Brazilian Studies in 2004 and Camoens Professor of Portuguese in 2005.

In 1996 he created the Centre for the Study of Brazilian Culture and Society, now incorporated into the King’s Brazil Institute. He is a former co-editor of Portuguese Studies and the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. In 2000 he was awarded the Order of Rio Branco by the Brazilian Government for services to Brazil-UK relations.

In 2018 he was awarded a three-year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for research on ‘Music and anti-racism in contemporary Brazil’.

Research Interests

• Brazilian Culture and Literature
• Brazilian popular music
• Afro-Brazilian culture and politics; anti-racism in Brazil
• Translation from Portuguese, including song translation

David Treece’s first research project addressed how Brazil’s indigenous, Amerindian communities have been represented in the country’s literature, in its social policies and in the history of nationalist thought. This was the subject of his monograph Exiles, Allies, Rebels: Brazil’s Indianist Movement, Indigenist Politics and the Imperial Nation-State (Greenwood Press, 2000), which was published in Portuguese by Nankin and the University of São Paulo Press (EDUSP) in 2008. From the early 1990s Treece worked on twentieth-century Brazilian poetry and fiction, co-authoring The Gathering of Voices: the twentieth-century poetry of Latin America (Verso, 1992) with Mike Gonzalez, and translating the fiction of João Gilberto Noll, Caio Fernando Abreu and João Guimarães Rosa.

Since 2000, Treece’s research activities have concentrated on Brazilian popular music, Afro-Brazilian music-making, the cultural politics of racism and anti-racism, and song translation. From 2003 to 2007 he directed a collaborative AHRC-funded project which produced the volume Cultures of the Lusophone Black Atlantic (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2007), co-edited by Nancy Naro, Roger Sansi-Roca, and David Treece. Brazilian Jive: From Samba to Bossa and Rap (Reaktion) was published in 2013, and in 2020 Anthem Press launched the edited volume Music Scenes and Migrations: Space and Transnationalism in Brazil, Portugal and the Atlantic. Besides pursuing practice-based research on Brazilian song translation, Treece is currently completing a book on “Music and anti-racism in contemporary Brazil”, research for which was supported by a three-year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship.

As a translator and musician, Treece has worked collaboratively on the dissemination of Brazilian popular music in the United Kingdom, including partnerships with musician and producer Gui Tavares, the vocal group Nossa Voz and with singer-songwriter Mônica Vasconcelos, in particular the project ‘The São Paulo Tapes: Brazilian Resistance Songs’.

For more details, please see his full research profile.

 

Selected publications

• ‘Música Popular Black and anti-racist struggles: musical cosmopolitanism and the soul aesthetic in Brazil (1963-1978)’, Brasiliana: Journal for Brazilian Studies 10 (2): 407-41.
• ‘The Challenges for Anti-racists in Bolsonaro’s Brazil’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 27 (2) (2021): 213-33.
• Music Scenes and Migrations: Space and Transnationalism in Brazil, Portugal and the Atlantic, edited by David Treece (Anthem Brazilian Studies, 2020), 241 pp. ISBN: 9781785273841
• ‘Language-In-Song, Language-As-Song: New Perspectives From Brazil On Song Translation Theory And Practice’, Santa Barbara Portuguese Studies 3: Theory and Practice of Translation in the Portuguese Speaking World Volume 3 (Digital Online Version) (2019), 24pp
• ‘Candeia, o projeto Quilombo e a militância anti-racista nos anos 70’, Revista do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros. 70 (2018): 166-88. DOI: https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2316-901X.v0i70p166-188
• Brazilian Jive: From Samba to Bossa and Rap (London: Reaktion Books, 2013) 224 pp. ISBN 10: 1780230850
• Exiles, Allies, Rebels: Brazil’s Indianist Movement, Indigenist Politics and the Imperial Nation-State (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000) 271 pp. ISBN 0-313-31125-0.