Lourdes Teodoro


Lourdes Teodoro is an Afro-Brazilian academic, writer, poet, and psychoanalyst who studies the effects of colonization on identity.

Biography

Maria de Lourdes Teodoro was born on 4 June 1946 in Vila Couros, Goiás, Brazil. In 1958, with the founding of Brasilia, her family relocated there, where she completed her secondary education. From her youth, she began publishing poems in student journals and newspapers, including Correio Braziliense, and with a group of other students published the Antologia de Alunos Escritores do Elefante Branco in 1966. After graduating from the University of Brasília with a degree in literature, she began teaching French and Literature at Centro Universitário de Brasília. In 1980, she began work on a doctorate at in Paris on Comparative Literature, graduating in 1984 with a dissertation entitled Identités antillaise et brésilienne à travers les oeuvres d'Aimé Césaire et de Mario de Andrade. The work, like many of her tracts, evaluates the effects of slavery and racism on Afro-Brazilians.
After returning to Brazil, Teodoro taught as an adjunct Professor at the Arts Institute of the University of Brasilia. In 1991 she began offering lectures in Africa, participating in seminars in Angola and Senegal. She helped with the founding of the Institute of Black Peoples in Burkino Faso, before moving to the United States. In 1996 Teodoro began graduate studies at Harvard University in African-American studies and psychoanalysis, which she completed in 1998. Her post-doctoral internship in childhood and adolescence psychopathology was completed at the psychiatry clinic of the University Hospital of Brasilia.
Teodoro currently conducts academic research at the Instituto de Pesquisas e Estudos Afro-brasileiras in Rio de Janeiro and is practicing psychoanalyst. She is a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association and an associate member of the Brasilia Psychoanalytic Society.

Selected works