Lanie Millar
Education
Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, The University of Texas at Austin (2011)
M.A. in Spanish, Middlebury College (2003)
B.A. in English and Spanish, Baylor University (2002)
Research
Lanie Millar is a comparative scholar of the Global South working in Spanish and Portuguese, with a particular focus on the Luso-African-Brazilian world and the Caribbean. Her research focuses on South-South comparison and transnational solidarity networks, drawing from literary and cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and theories of racialization. She is the author of Forms of Disappointment. Cuban and Angolan Narrative After the Cold War (SUNY Press, 2019), which argues that late 20th and early 21st century Cuban and Angolan novels enact a poetics of disappointment: narrative techniques which constitute a new formal and affective relationship to the histories of revolution shared across the South Atlantic. Research for this project was supported by the Kluge Center at the U.S. Library of Congress and the Luso-American Development Foundation/ Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo in Lisbon, Portugal. She was the editor of the issue "Cuba and the Global South" (The Global South 13.1, 2020). Her translation, together with Fabienne Moore, of essays by Angolan intellectual Mário Pinto de Andrade (1928-1990) on African liberation, national development, and Black cultural vindication was published by Polity Books in 2024. Her current book-in-progress, Gender and Empire in the Lusophone World, examines feminist solidarities and revolutionary masculinities in contemporary cultural memories of African empires in Angola, Brazil, and Mozambique.
Languages: Spanish and Portuguese.
Publications
Book:
Forms of Disappointment. Cuban and Angolan Narratives After the Cold War. SUNY Press. 2019.
Translation:
Edited Journal issue:
"Cuba and the Global South." The Global South 13.1 (Spring, 2019 [2020]).
Articles:
"Cuban Afterlives of the Cuban and Angolan Revolutions." The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature, edited by Vicky Unruh and Jacqueline Loss, Cambridge UP, 2024, pp. 580-593. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009168359.038
"Gender and Empire in Mozambican Fictions of Ngungunyane." Hispania vol. 107, nos. 2-3, 2024, pp. 397-410. https://doi-org.uoregon.idm.oclc.org/10.1353/hpn.2024.a929136
"Cuban Revolutionary Literature." Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, edited by Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Oxford UP. 2015—. Article published May 24, 2023; last modified, May 24, 2023. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1361.
“Manuel Rui and Postcolonial Angola As It Is Not.” Thinking World Literature from Lusophone Perspectives, special issue of the Journal of Lusophone Studies, ed. Krista Brune and Thayse Leal, vol. 6, no. 1, 2021, pp. 110-130.
“Mário Pinto de Andrade, the Cultural Congress of Havana, and the Role of Culture in the Global South.” The Cultural Cold War and the Global South: Sites of Contest and Communitas. Ed. Kerry Bystrom, Monica Popescu, and Katherine Zien. Routledge, 2021, pp 45-61.
“Nicolás Guillén and Poesia Negra de Expressão Portuguesa (1953).” Transatlantic Studies. Iberia, Latin America, Africa, edited by Cecilia Enjuto Rangel, Sebastiaan Faber, Pedro García Caro, and Robert Newcomb, Liverpool UP, 2019.
"Luanda in Santiago and Santiago in Luanda: Trans-Atlantic Dimensions in Cuban and Angolan Poetry." MLN, vol. 133, no. 5, 2018, pp. 1277-1303.
“Postwar Politics in O herói and Kangamba.” The Global South Atlantic, edited by Kerry Bystrom and Joseph Slaughter, Fordham UP, 2018, pp. 207-224.
"La ironía en dos obras de Alejo Carpentier: El siglo de las luces y La consagración de la primavera." 200/ 100/ 50: Carpentier, la emancipación y las revoluciones americanas, edited by Luisa Campuzano, Letras Cubanas, 2015, pp. 251-264.
"Circling the South Atlantic: Revolution in J. E. Agualusa's The Year That Zumbi Took Rio." The Global South vol. 7, no. 2, 2014, pp. 87-109.
"Practices of the Plantation in La loma del ángel." Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Literatures vol 37, no. 1, 2013, pp. 92-112.
"Aguas inquietas: La Kianda en tres novelas angoleñas contemporáneas." Revolución y Cultura no. 1, 2013, pp. 16-22.
“A Friendship Forged With Blood: Cuban Literature of the Angolan War.” Romance Notes, vol. 52, no. 3, 2012, pp. 325-332.
Teaching
Winter, 2025:
SPAN 344: Hispanic Cultures IV (1939-present)
Offered Periodically:
Several courses may be available for upper-division Portuguese credit. Please see me to find out more.
Caribbean Crossings (Grad/ Undergrad)
Comparison from the South (Grad; COLT 615)
Cultures of the Cuban Revolution in Context (Grad/ Undergrad)
Theorizing the Plantation (Grad/ Undergrad; Spanish/Portuguese)
Runaways, Rebellions and Revolutions in the Black Atlantic (Grad/ Undergrad; Spanish/Portuguese)
Afro-Latin American Literature (Grad/ Undergrad; Spanish/Portuguese)
The Latin American Dictator Novel (Grad/ Undergrad)
Hispanic Cultures Through Literature III (SPAN 343)
Hispanic Cultures Through Literature IV (SPAN 344)
Introduction to Narrative (SPAN 353)
The Chinese in Latin America (Undergrad; SPAN/ CHN 200M)
Intro to Luso-Brazilian Literature and Culture, 19th-21st Centuries (PORT 399)
Traveling the Portuguese-Speaking World (Grad/ Undergrad; English/ Portuguese)