Episode 131 - Victoria Saramago: "This is the challenge that I want to tackle right now."

Associate Professor Victoria Saramago of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures grew up fascinated by storytelling. From wanting to be a fiction writer to now an academic who studies novels, she digs into the relations between literature, cultures, and the perception of environmental change, environmental humanities, and energy.  Listen to Professor Saramago's career journey of bringing her passion from Brazil to the US and continues to teach, research, and mentor students in her role as a UChicago professor. 

Transcript

Stephen 00:00
Hello, and welcome to The Course. I'm your host, Stephen, and today I'm speaking with Professor Victoria Saramago of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.

Professor Saramago is the author of Fictional Environments, Mimesis, and Deforestation in Latin America, which won the Brazilian Studies Association's Robert Reyes Book Award in 2022.

She's also co edited the Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics and Literature Beyond the Human, Post Anthropocentric Brazil. She's here today to talk to us about how her interest in fictional environments led her to research how fiction deals with questions of environment, as well as ecology, energy use, and similar topics.

And of course, how she became a University of Chicago professor. Professor Saramago, thank you so much for joining us on The Course. How are you this evening? 

Victoria Saramago 00:46 
 I'm doing great. Thank you. How are you? 

Stephen 00:49
Thanks. Let's just start off with the basics. Could you please tell us what your position is at the university and just a little bit in layman's terms of like what, what it really is that you do there. 

Victoria Saramago 01:00
Okay, so I'm an associate professor of Hispanic and Luso Brazilian Studies, in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, also affiliated faculty at the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization, and I work on Latin American literatures and cultures, mostly 20th and 21st centuries.

My favorite period is like the mid-20th century, you know, like, from the 1940s to the 1970s, and I love working on relations between literatures, cultures, and the perception of environmental change, environmental humanities, and also more recently I have started working with energy. Like how to think about this connection between cultural production and, for example, electricity, oil, hydropower, you know, like what types of connections we can establish,  between the ways we narrate and make sense of the energy intensive societies in which we live through culture. 

Stephen 02:07
This interest in literature is that something that goes way back? I mean, did you always kind of think that you would be in a literary field of some sort?

Victoria Saramago 02:20
Ah yes, I do wanted to be a writer even before I learned to read and write, you know, I would like create little stories in booklets and be very annoyed that I did not know how to read and write. And then I think my whole childhood was pretty much marked by this fascination with storytelling, with the ways in which we just create another world, you know, that did not seem to exist until somehow it does or how we as readers just kind of can enter this other universe that offers so much that seems like that seems like that we cannot exhaust it, you know, so I always had this big fascination with fiction storytelling and the creation of this alternative worlds, you know, through storytelling.

So for me, yeah, I wanted to write, I wrote fiction throughout my childhood, a bit of poetry too, but I also love to read, you know, so I could just spend the whole day reading from morning to evening like during vacations whenever I had a chance. So but I also had other interests. I love music. I played the piano as a kid, you know. 

And then when I was a teenager I had a rock band. I wanted to be like a rock star, something like that. And I think it became clear early enough that I just did not have the talent to become a musician, nor the temperament, you know, like either to spend hours and hours and hours practicing, playing the piano, or to be a rock star, for that matter. I'm much more of a library person who likes to like to stay in my office, reading, writing, and like sharing knowledge, you know.

The idea, the dream of being a writer and then later on of like working with literature, working with words and stories. I think it's something that started very early and never really went away, you know.

Stephen 04:27
Can you tell me about your undergraduate experience?  You went to college, and then I think actually some graduate school in Brazil. Is that correct? 

Victoria Saramago 04:35
Exactly. So I, I was born and raised in Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro. So like very big and vibrant city with a lot going on. And I went to a college at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, which is like a relatively large public university, you know, that had and still has a very good literature program.

And at that time, as I said, I still wanted to be a writer. So, in Brazil, as well as in many other places, but I think particularly in Brazil at that time, it was relatively common for professors of literature to be writers as well. So, the two careers were by no means incompatible. And my plan was to study language and literature, eventually become a university professor and keep a career as a writer in parallel.

And to a certain extent, that's what happened throughout my undergraduate years. You know, I published a few things, published a novel, published some short stories. But at the same time, I discovered my love for research, my love for theory and criticism, you know. I realized that everything that I had thought about as a kid, that all this fascination with storytelling and with fiction, you know, that there were concepts, there were theories that could like shed light onto so many of the thoughts, the questions that I had.

And so, since I remember since my early weeks, you know, as an undergraduate student taking like this Theory of Literature, one class, and learning about like the Russian formalists or reading Aristotle. And it was like a huge eye-opening experience for me. And I realized that actually as much as I wanted to become a writer, I also had a passion for literary studies.

I did my undergraduate studies more broadly, more broadly for scholarship, you know, that I really wanted to invest on. So yeah, so these two paths kind of ran in parallel until well, mostly until I came to the United States. So I did my undergrad in Brazil, my master's in Brazil too, in Brazilian literature.

I was very interested in Brazilian literature, but I started developing an increasing interest in Spanish American literature, as well as, you know, world literature as we call it today in undergraduate curricula. I really loved, yeah, reading novels and especially novels. I really had a fascination for this genre.

After my master's, I realized that I did not have to stay in Brazil to do a PhD that I could go somewhere else, you know, and this is something that actually, there was not a lot of information about this type of opportunity in Brazil at that time. And I was very lucky that I had good mentors, you know, my MA thesis advisor actually did his PhD at Stanford University, where I also ended up doing my PhD. And I think that this connection was really important for me in kind of opening these horizons, you know.

Stephen 08:11
I was going to ask about the move from Brazil to the U.S. for your PhD. I mean, why do you think looking back that that was like an important move to make?

Cause I assume that you could have continued, you know, following these same passions in Brazil, 

Victoria Saramago 08:28
Yes, definitely. And the Brazilian university system is really a fantastic system. I really, like I plan to go back to Brazil for a significant portion of my graduate studies in the US, in fact, you know, and I think I would have had a good shot if I had tried to go back to Brazil. 

But at that point of my life, I felt like there was, you know, there were new opportunities. There were scholars I wanted to work with, there were fields I wanted to learn more about. And I realized that studying in the United States was in fact a possibility. Because, you know, I was, as I said back then, we did not have much information, you know, my two parents are actually academics.

My father is a historian and my mom was a philosophy professor. She's retired now, and they did not know that this possibility existed. And I remember when I told my dad, so I want to do my PhD in the United States. He said, well, and first thing he said was like, okay, and how do you plan to pay for it? You know, and we, and, you know, we just didn't know that there were fellowships, that there were stipends, and then I could actually come here and you know, have this kind of financial dimension of my studies covered by fellowships from the universities. 

So, I really wanted to study the novel, as I said, it was really a passion of mine at the same time as I was writing novels and trying to find a place in the literary market in Brazil. And Stanford had a very strong tradition of novel studies, had the Center for the Study of the Novel, of which I had the privilege later on of being a graduate coordinator.

So, I really wanted to go to Stanford and fortunately enough, João Cesar de Castro Rocha, this mentor of mine who was really important, is really one of the most brilliant people that I have met and opened a lot of doors in, both in terms of like how to think about literature and at the same time about how to act in the academic world and in the academic job market. So, he told me about, you know, what does it entail to do a PhD in the United States. So, his mentoring was fundamental. And I decided to go to Stanford. It was my first option. I applied for a couple of schools. 

But, yeah, so much has changed, you know, back then. I already knew, I already was very intrigued by the notion of space in novels, you know. And by the notion and by the idea that space, So many novels that I was studying or was interested in studying they had this very strong sense of a certain environment that was conveyed, you know, either the Brazilian backlands or the Amazonian forest, you know, and I could sense that there was something there that I wanted to explore.

But when I came to the U.S., in fact, I did not even know that the environmental humanities, that eco criticism, you know, that all these fields that today are pretty much my scholarly home, that they existed. It's something that I started to realize that I was already thinking in what I would say, like, eco critical terms, environmental terms, even before I know that these fields really existed were, you know, out there and that were emerging fields, that there was so much excitement and energy about like re-reading the whole Latin American literary corpus and archive from the viewpoint of the environmental transformations and environmental questions more broadly. So this was for me, like, a big discovery, and that converged very nicely with my interest in the novel, in the history and theory of the novel.

You know, that, you know, have conformed a good part of my scholarly work, my work as a teacher and the way in which I keep like my enthusiasm, my excitement about my work.

Stephen 13:12
This is really interesting and I want to make sure that we're defining things clearly for listeners. You talked about having, you know, interest in novels senses of environment, like in the broad sense, I think of kind of like the setting, right, the physical setting. But, you're also describing, if I'm hearing you correctly, a sort of emerging, or, you know, recently emerged sets of fields kind of within literary criticism that are now like thinking very deeply about questions that environmentalists might ask, right, or about like ecology? Can you just sort of tease that out a little bit more for people? 

Victoria Saramago 13:50
Yeah, sure. So, yeah, we, so eco criticism is usually used more for like literary studies. It was a term that was very used in the 1990s, early 2000s, and environmental humanities is a more recent term. I mean, eco criticism is still very used and environmental humanities is like a more interdisciplinary term, like it encompasses literary studies, but also, Cinema studies, visual arts, you know, like all the range of ways through which we can, have a humanistic inquiry about environmental issues.

And fundamentally, these fields, they ask ourselves, okay, so what does it mean to think about environment, about ecology, about the ecological crisis about the Anthropocene, you know, which is like this possible neo geological epoch in which we would be living, a bit like, it's a term a bit in flux now, but anyways, but how do we make sense of this whole environment that is in which we live and that we are fundamentally transforming and affecting in irreversible terms.

And how do we make sense of it from a cultural perspective? You know, in other words, what do novels, for example, have to tell us about environments? And that's part of what I do in my first book is like try to understand how our very idea of what certain environments are, is conformed by our reading of novels or by stories that we have heard or by movies that we have watched, you know.

I mean of course this is my more like personal take on the field, but it is a field that is just so diverse and that opens so many doors, you know, because you can think like, about eco feminism, you can think about environmental justice. There are just so many, like, interdisciplinary connections that an environmental angle allows us to draw, you know. And yeah, so this is in a nutshell how I see the environmental humanities today.

Stephen 16:11
So you mentioned your first book, I understand that you are currently at work on another monograph. could you just tell us a little bit about, the research that is like exciting to you at this moment? 

Victoria Saramago 16:22
Yeah, so as I said, I am extremely excited to work on energy, you know, and there is this emerging field, the energy humanities that has been expanding to, you know, of course, always as part of this larger questions that we ask about the environment, about environmental impact, you know. So, what I love about writing about energy is that it's something that is just hiding in plain sight.

Right? And especially for me, who have been so fascinated about how we narrate, how we represent, how we make sense of the world around us through narrative, through literature, through cultural production. It is truly fascinating to tease out the infinite ramifications, you know, of energy, of like how oil is just part of our lives.

Like, it's just impossible to even start like just separating where oil is and where oil is not, right? Electricity, like, how would you and I be communicating if we didn't have our laptops connected right now, right? 

Stephen 17:39
Yes, I’m looking at all the plastic on my desk right now. All of them are petroleum by-products.

Victoria Saramago 17:42
Exactly. So, it is a type of object, you know, in my first book I was writing about environments that were relatively, that were well culturally encoded, you know, so if you think of the rainforest, you know, If you think of rural areas, the desert, you know, there is a certain cultural imagination of those areas, especially in like a region like Latin America, that you can immediately think, okay, rainforest.

I know what this means. I'll think of the Amazon, you know. And when you think about energy, you are thinking about virtually anything, right? And I think that this is the type of challenge that I want to tackle right now, to understand how we make sense of the extreme dependence that we have on energy and the ways in which our thirst for energy has been consuming the planet and how it permeates the way we think, the way we narrate, the way we create those fictional right?

So, this is for me what I, what I am really fascinated about. And that's why I'm writing about electricity. In the context of Brazil, you know, mostly in the 20th century, but also like 21st century production and, you know, even ways through which electricity has been felt and narrated, but that have not been visible to us as such, you know. 

For example, Brazil had, just like many other countries in South America, had a military dictatorship from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, which was characterized by a lot of repression of dissidents, you know, or people who were just perceived as dissidents, and those people would be tortured. And the basic form of torture back then was electroshock. You know, and then, which is like the forum of torture of the mid 20th century, you know and later on. 

Stephen 19:58
And execution, I guess

Victoria Saramago 20:00
Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And there have been works on the electric chair in the United States, and the intellectual and cultural history of the electric chair. but if you think, for example, about like a…

So when we started having a bit of a Democratic opening in the late 1970s in Brazil, there was the, like a, there was a number of works like either fictional accounts or real accounts of prisoners, you know, or people who had been tortured and arrested. And then you start having like this experience of the electroshock that appears as this kind of the worst, the most horrifying form of torture, you know? 

And if you come to think of it, this is one of the ways in which we can see, like, energy in action in a way that is culturally codified. You do have a corpus, you know, about narratives of torture, so it's not something that, you know, I just came up with, this archive does exist. Yet it is something that is completely like that completely escapes the way you would think about, oh, just electricity, right? Like, so that's what I am trying to do. 

I'm trying to find those stories, those genealogies, those ways of thinking about and understanding electricity that may not seem obvious to us, but that nevertheless they characterize the way in which we live in our contemporary society, you know, it is a society that needs this constant, this infinite supply of energy.

And what can we, as cultural theorists, as cultural scholars, ask about that? What types of questions emerge when we look at our dependence on energy from the point of view of the stories we tell? 

Stephen 22:08
I just wanted to ask about what your day to day or I'm realizing that there's usually no typical day to day, but maybe week to week, month to month, kind of what your responsibilities look like, how you're able to balance time spent doing research with teaching and your other, you know, responsibilities as a professor. 

Victoria Saramago 22:25
Yeah, so, I think that we always would like to have more time for research, right? This is a, a chronic issue. I, myself, I love doing research. I love writing. But I also love teaching and I love the work of the students and I love to see the students writing and to see the students having ideas.

You know, one of the things that I like the most in my day-to-day life is when a student comes to my office hour really excited, having tons of ideas, asking me, like, where to go from now, or just, like, having this idea that could become a very cool paper, or just a very cool research project, you know. So I try to think about my day to day activities in this, through this more, like, holistic senses, you know, about how this activity constant activity, this constant excitement about thinking, about creating, about understanding things, can express itself. Not only when I'm doing research, which would seem in the first moment as the most obvious place, right, for creation.

But also, when I teach, when I present in congresses, you know, even when I am, let's say, in a committee and I have to read dozens and dozens of applications, and on the one hand it's like, okay, it's a lot of work, usually we have very little time to do it, but at the same time, this, this act of learning about what somebody wants to do as a research project and learning with the person. It’s fascinating. So I would say I always try to find some time in my day to day life to do a little bit of research, even if it's a little bit every day. Yeah, and like, have, of course, enough time to prepare my classes, to have a, hold office hours, and also to have this, this broader dialogue with the intellectual communities to which we belong, right?

Both with students, undergraduate and graduate students, but also with other scholars in my field with whom I collaborate, or with whom I share panels, So, yeah, I would say that all these components of my job are really important to me and really gratifying in their own way.

Stephen 24:52
What advice would you offer to someone who said that, you know, they wanted to follow in your footsteps or follow you like into this field? 

Victoria Saramago 25:01
The academic career has a very straightforward path in a certain way, right?

In order to become a university professor, you must have a college degree. In many cases, increasingly most cases, you have a master's degree, and you must have a PhD degree, right? And also, it's becoming increasingly common to be a postdoc. So it feels like it is a path that is very well defined, right?

In which you have to do one thing that will lead to the other and that will lead to the other. And that ended up being what I did, in fact, because I already knew that I wanted to become an academic, in spite of the fact that I was kind of very aware of the difficulties of academic life, and I was pretty down to earth and even a bit blussy about, you know, jumping out and trying to get a job as a public servant in Brazil if things did not go well.

But so far as things have been going well. I did everything like one step after the other. I did my BA right after my MA right after my PhD and I was starting to write my dissertation when the job at UChicago came up and I said, Oh my gosh, I need to get this job. And, you know, I finished my PhD really fast to start my, to start working here.

But I would say that for most people, including myself, I increasingly see my work, my career, as part of my life. You know, I think it's very easy to think that you have this model, that you have to follow one step after the other. and she'll lose track of the whole, of the fact that, you know, your PhD is part of your life, not the other way around, you know, and I am sure that many students will have heard about the difficulties of the academic job market and that’s all true, but at the same time, there is no need to follow the steps one after the other.

I mean, I think I would advise students to see their academic career as part of their lives as a whole and try to match their academic goals with their life goals and understand what is it that they really want, you know, from life. And like conform their academic path to their life objectives instead of just taking the BA, MA, PhD, postdoc, tenure track job as a kind of template to which they have to conform.

Stephen 27:43
That's really cool. I mean, I think in some level that's good advice whatever track, whatever career you're in.  

Victoria Saramago 27:50
No need to do what I did. I just happened with me, but each person has their own life, right? 

Stephen 27:56
Thank you, Professor Saramago, for your time today. And Course Takers, if you enjoyed today's interview, please check out the other ones. Leave us a comment, subscribe, follow, and share this episode with your friends and family. You can find out more about the University of Chicago through uchicago.edu or the university's campus in Hong Kong through uchicago.hk. Stay tuned for more, and thanks for listening!