G.R.O.U.P. Apprenticeships

Apprenticeships pair faculty members and undergraduate students in summer research projects, allowing the students to develop new skills under the guidance of a faculty mentor and to experience the rigor and excitement of academic research in an area of their interest.  Faculty gain the time and opportunity to explore new ideas, and the collaboration with their apprentice may generate new undergraduate courses and curricula.

Summer 2009

Hello Brazil: Folk and Popular Culture in 21st-Century Latin America

Faculty Sponsor: Candace Slater (Spanish & Portuguese)
Student Apprentice: Lynsay Richardson

The title “Hello Brazil” plays off the title of the 1979 movie classic, Bye Bye Brazil, a light-hearted and yet influential movie. It goes beyond current truisms that modernity has proven far less monolithic than the film suggests and that the terms “folk” and “popular” are multi-faceted inventions to examine the specific place or places of the seemingly archaic in 21st Latin America. To this end, it focuses on a part of the Northeast Brazilian interior called the Cariri after its original Indian inhabitants. This region’s richness of “traditional” expressive forms has often caused it to be hailed as the “true” Brazil.

The Summer Apprentice worked intensively with Professor Slater in preparation for this book project in both California and in Northeast Brazil, and with the Lira Nordestina, a cordel press in Juazeiro do Norte.

G.R.O.U.P. summer apprenticeships 2008.
G.R.O.U.P. summer apprenticeships 2007.
G.R.O.U.P. summer apprenticeships 2006.
G.R.O.U.P. summer apprenticeships 2005.