The Brazilian Academy of Letters has a new corresponding member. Professor Kenneth David Jackson, professor of Brazilian literature at Yale University, was elected last Thursday, the 5th, to chair number 2, which will become vacant with the death of the French philosopher Edgar Morin in May 2026.
He is a specialist in Portuguese-Brazilian literature. His passion for Brazil began in 1964, during a university orchestra tour, which led him to study Portuguese and obtain his doctorate in 1973.
He became fascinated by Brazil after a trip with the college orchestra in 1964. He began studying Portuguese in 1965 and obtained his doctorate in 1973. He has been at Yale since 1993.
He was a student of Jorge de Sena, a Portuguese exile who became a naturalized Brazilian and later moved to the United States. Sena was crucial to his dedication to Luso-Brazilian studies.
He is one of the main figures responsible for disseminating the work of Machado de Assis and also of Brazilian modernists in the English language. A Texan trained in music as well as literature, he has published, over the years, works on Brazilian and Portuguese literature, especially avant-garde literature, and on the presence of Portuguese culture in Asian countries, such as in “From Chaul to Batticaloa: The Marks of the Portuguese Maritime Empire in India and Sri Lanka”.
The works of Camões, Pessoa, Mario de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, and Patricia Rehder Galvão, known as Pagu, are among his main interests – these are further motivated by the lasting friendship he maintained with some of the most prolific Brazilian intellectuals, such as the literary critics Benedito Nunes and Haroldo de Campos. However, it is Machado de Assis who holds his greatest fascination.
In 2006, he organized the “Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story,” which included 10 short stories by the author. In 2015, he published a lengthy study on the founder of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, “Machado de Assis: A Literary Life,” proposing a markedly psychological-philosophical view of his novels.
This can already be considered one of the most important works published in the United States about the Brazilian author, continuing the critical legacy left by Helen Caldwell, who revolutionized the interpretation of Dom Casmurro with the essay The Brazilian Othello of Machado de Assis (translated in Brazil as O Otelo Brasileiro de Machado de Assis), in 1960.
Congratulations, Professor Jackson!