PLAS Graduate Workshop | Fernanda Conforto de Oliveira & Daniel Persia

1ST PRESENTATION

“The First Standby Arrangements Of The Imf In Argentina And Brazil, 1956–64”

Fernanda Conforto de Oliveira, Geneva Graduate Institute; History

Discussant: Grigore Pop-Eleches, Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is central to global economic governance as the world’s leading crisis lender. Scholars have conducted broad structural studies and single-case studies to understand IMF lending patterns. However, we still know little about what happens inside the black box of policy making and financial negotiations of the IMF. This paper combines tools in Digital Humanities with traditional historical methods to examine over 1,000 recently declassified documents from the IMF staff and Executive Board. The goal is to understand why national officials from these two countries reacted differently during engagements with the IMF: Argentine authorities sought to comply and cooperate with the Fund, while their Brazilian counterparts hesitated. My paper opens up the black box of policymaking and financial negotiations to examine the opinions, reasons, and attitudes of IMF officials, showing that the Fund dealt with both countries in a process of learning where these parallel and simultaneous interactions influenced their views and attitudes in each case and cannot be read as independent from one another.

Fernanda Conforto de Oliveira is a Ph.D. candidate in International History and Politics and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Finance and Development at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Currently, she is a visiting student researcher in the Department of History at Princeton University.

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2ND PRESENTATION

“The Translator’s “I”: Navigating Subjectivity in the 21st Century”

Daniel Persia, Spanish and Portuguese, Princeton

Discussant: Dylan Blau Edelstein, Ph.D. Candidate, Spanish and Portuguese, Princeton

In a moment steeped in reactionary politics, with increasing attention paid to individual and collective identities, translators are often left questioning whether, or how, to take on projects that cross lines of difference. This presentation gathers a series of (para)texts at the intersection of Translation, Latin American, and Black Studies—and, more specifically, in the space of the Black Atlantic—to highlight some of the major shifts in translational thinking since the late twentieth century. Historically, there has been an absence of visible models from which translators can glean insights to better formulate—and articulate—their intellectual and theoretical commitments. I suggest that, not only do these models exist, but they (1) demonstrate how the key tenets of Black Studies help to redefine the imaginative work (and field) of translation across the Americas and (2) solidify translation as a vital mechanism for the expansion of the field of Black Studies outward, from the United States into the majority world.

Daniel Persia is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. His translations have appeared in journals such as Asymptote, Circumference, Exchanges, and Kenyon Review Online. Before coming to Princeton, he served as a National Science Foundation Noyce Teaching Fellow at the Boston Arts Academy and Regional Lead for the US-Brazil Fulbright Commission, overseeing grantees in the states of São Paulo and Paraná. He has been a fellow with the Program in Latin American Studies, the Center for Digital Humanities, and the Brazil LAB.

MODERATOR

Will Mullaney, PLAS Graduate Fellow, Comparative Literature

This workshop is open to students, faculty, visiting scholars and staff. Lunch will be provided while supplies last.