João G. L. Viana

I am a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate working chiefly on Latin American and Luso-Afro-Brazilian cultural production with a post-anthropocentric perspective.

My dissertation examines how psychotropic experiences become political in Brazilian and Hispanic poetry and fiction. Drawing from novels, cró/ônicas, short stories, and poems from Brazil, Colombia, and Spain at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, it investigates how scenes of mind alteration both condition and reflect power relations in those regions. In doing so, it uncovers historical antecedents of two simultaneous but uneven contemporary problematics in the hemisphere: Drug Wars and the so-called "psychedelic Renaissance." Calling attention both to the biochemical specificity of psychotropy and to the generally underestimated power of cultural tropes in conditioning it, my project aims to denaturalize the charged notion of "drugs," and to advance an ecocentric conception of the psychoactive.

I was a Teaching Assistant for the course ILAC 140/CHILATST 140 - Migration in 21st-Century Latin American Film last Fall.

Between 2022 and 2025, I was Graduate Student Coordinator at Materia, a Research Unit on Latin Americanist and comparative anthropo-decentrisms.

I was also Teaching Assistant at the core ILAC course ILAC 131 Introduction to Latin America: Cultural Perspectives in 2024 and 2025.

Additionally, I was an instructor with the Portuguese program between Fall 2022 and Fall 2023; I continue to work with Stanford's Center for Latin American Studies to support student engagement with the program. Visit our Instagram page to learn more about Portuguese at Stanford.