Tessa Wood

Tessa Wood is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her dissertation focuses on the relationship between literature and discourses surrounding public and popular education in Brazil and Spanish America. In particular, it examines how literature offers critical revisions to narratives that frame education as a humanizing or emancipatory project, especially those that portray it as a means of integrating subjects on the periphery of national identity. At UC Berkeley, she co-organizes the Brazilian Studies Working Group at the Townsend Center for the Humanities. Her project has been supported previously by the UCB John L. Simpson Pre-Dissertation Research Fellowship in International and Area Studies, the Tinker Foundation, the Berkeley-Portugal Research Fellowship, the UCB Center for Race and Gender, and the UC Chancellor’s Fellowship, among others. She holds a B.A. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard College.