Kevin W. Ennis is a PhD candidate in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies and is serving as the Editorial Proctor in the Center for Language Studies for the 2022–23 academic year. In his role, Kevin is working alongside CLS Associate Director Jeremy Lehnen as the Assistant to the Editor of the Journal of Lusophone Studies and with the student editors of the undergraduate journal The Polyglot. His work in the publishing processes for these two journals has been an enriching professionalization experience, as he has firsthand been processing, preparing, and publishing the academic journal articles that we all download from library databases, as well as curating article submissions as cohesive components of larger journal issues. The editorial skills that Kevin has developed and refined as part of the Proctorship has complemented all of his teaching and pedagogical experiences from the Portuguese language classroom here at Brown, emphasizing how we use the languages under our belts to effectively communicate with larger audiences.

Kevin’s primary geographical area of research is Amazonia. While he focuses on Brazilian literary and cultural studies and works primarily in Portuguese, he also works in Spanish with Colombian and Peruvian cultural production surrounding Amazonia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Kevin brings his experiences with multilingual writing to the forefront of his editorial work, personally acquainted with the challenges and pleasures of bridging languages together in academic work. Outside of his academic work, Kevin speaks some Galician, having studied in Santiago de Compostela a few summers ago as part of the Real Academia Galega’s “Galego sen fronteiras” (Galician Without Borders) program. He also looks forward to learning how to read French at some point in the coming years.

Andressa M. Maia is a PhD student in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies and is serving as the Language Learning Technology Proctor in the Center for Language Studies for the Spring of 2023. Andressa is working under CLS Director Jane Sokolosky supervision to design and create teaching materials to accompany the textbooks used to teach POBS 0105 and POBS 0400 courses. For this position, she is exploring the Libros Cartoneros collection at the John Hay Library to develop activities focused on ecologically oriented and human-decentered discourses to respond to the climate crisis in the Brazilian context. 

Andressa’s passion for teaching language and conducting research are mutually constitutive. She explores novel methodologies to analyze literary texts, particularly from Brazil and Colombia, through the intersection of literary and cultural studies with digital and environmental humanities. Her research interests lie in how artistic productions can expand Latin America's environmental imagination by signaling other ways to understand and interact with the natural world. Her experience as a Portuguese Language Teacher Assistant at Brown will allow her to explore and incorporate digital tools and novel methodologies to design materials that can offer an enriching learning experience to Portuguese language students.