Iuri Bauler Pereira

• 20th and 21st century Latin American literature and visual cultures
• Countercultures, underground, and alternative cultures
• Brazilian Studies
• Global 1960s, Third-Worldism, Cold War and Hemispheric studies
• Latin American cinema and film studies
• Intellectual history, theory of history, historiography

My research focuses on 20th and 21st century Brazilian and Latin American literatures and visual culture, especially in their relations with countercultures, avant-garde movements and radical politics. I am interested in the interactions between experimental cultural forms and alternative political discourses about the world.

My book manuscript Fourth World Internationalism: The Geographic Imagination of the Latin American Counterculture (1968-1980) reflects this research agenda by placing Brazilian cultural production in conversation with global and hemispheric discourses during the 1960s and 1970s. I examine how intellectuals and artists from Brazil and Argentina engaged in novel forms of geographic imagination through countercultural practices (underground publications, independent filmmaking, street performance, psychedelic experiments) creatively incorporating Inter-American, Third-Worldist, and Afro-Asian discourses, leaving a lasting but oft-forgotten impact on culture and politics across the region. Exploring an archive of underground publications, experimental literature and film, alternative newspapers, independent documentaries, festival and conference ephemera, ethnographic notebooks, personal letters and travel diaries, the book traces the emergence of an alternative form of internationalism in the period. Related to this research, I recently published a chapter on the literary networks and cosmopolitan ideas of Argentine countercultural writer Miguel Grinberg for the edited volume Worlding Latin America: Corpus, Praxis, and Global Networks (De Gruyter, 2025).

My second book project will also explore the intersection of culture and politics, placing Brazil within a broader regional and global framework. Abertura: A Cultural History of Brazilian Redemocratization will analyze the role of artists and intellectuals in the period of transition from military dictatorship to liberal democracy in Brazil, in dialogue with similar experiences in Portugal, Argentina and Spain. I am interested in how a “culture of transition” transformed the ideas of popular culture, alternative experimentation, intellectual engagement, and, ultimately, the horizons of radical politics and liberal democracy in the 1980s and beyond. This book project is also aligned with an ongoing public humanities project, Countermemories, a digital platform and oral history project that documents contemporary initiatives addressing the public memory of military dictatorships in Latin America through independent archives, visual arts, and anti-monumental activism. The project is current in development, and was supported by a grant from the Heyman Center Public Humanities Fellowship at Columbia University.

I teach courses on Latin American countercultures, Brazilian literature and cultural studies, the Global 1960s and the Cold War, U.S. and Latin American intellectual history, Latinx cultures, Latin American Studies, and global/transnational topics.