Ligia Bezerra

Lígia Bezerra was born in Várzea Alegre, Ceará, Brazil. She moved to the United States in 2006, where she completed a master's in Portuguese at the University of New Mexico and a doctorate in Portuguese with a minor in cultural studies at Indiana University. She also holds a master's in linguistics from Universidade Federal do Ceará. She taught Portuguese and English language and linguistics in Brazil, and has taught Portuguese and Spanish language and Lusophone literature and culture in the United States. Bezerra's research interests include Latin American literature and culture, consumption, everyday life, neoliberalism, and democracy. She has published articles in journals such as Chasqui, Journal of Lusophone Studies (formerly known as ellipsis), Revista de Estudos de Literatura Brasileira Contemporânea, Luso-Brazilian Review, and Cultural Studies. Her book, Everyday Consumption in Twenty-First-Century Brazilian Fiction (Purdue University Press, 2022), is the first in-depth study to map out the representation of consumption in contemporary Brazilian prose, highlighting how our interactions with commodities connect seemingly disconnected areas of everyday life, such as eating habits, the growth of prosperity theology, and ideas of success and failure. Her current project focuses on how Brazilian Popular Music articulates resistance to anti-democratic forces in the twenty-first century.