Senior Lecturer in Portuguese and Latin American Studies
Ed’s research focuses on contemporary digital, visual and literary cultures in Latin America and beyond. He is particularly interested in the use of speculative fiction and multi-media texts, from comics to artists’ books, to expose and contest the shifting power dynamics of the digital age and the changing conceptions of the human that these generate. His second monograph, Virtual Orientalism in Brazilian Culture (Palgrave, 2015), explores orientalist discourses surrounding Japanese immigration to Brazil in the context of networked digital culture. The book builds on historical studies of Japanese immigration in the region to analyse the influence of digital culture on changing conceptions of race and immigration in the Americas.
Other published works include Science Fiction and Digital Technologies in Argentine and Brazilian Culture (Palgrave: 2013) and Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America (UCL Press, 2017; co-authored with Joanna Page), which examines the emergence of the graphic novel in Latin America as a uniquely powerful medium through which to explore the nature of twenty-first century subjectivity and especially forms of embodiment or mediation that bind humans to their non-human environment. He is currently completing a monograph titled Entwined Being: Twins in Global Cultures of Connectivity (forthcoming with Bloomsbury) that traces the ways in which twins have been used in different fields of knowledge and representational practices to map the increasingly intricate entanglements of human subjects and their technological and natural environments. He is also leading a Newton-funded research project together with colleagues in the Universidade de Campinas on the intersection between digital literacy and social inclusion in Brazil.
Recent publications:
- King, E. 2020. Disjunctive Temporalities of Migration in Photobooks from Brazil’. In Transnational Portuguese Studies. Ed. by Hilary Owen and Claire Williams. Liverpool University Press. 233-248.
- King, E. 2020. ‘Photography as Anthropotechnique and the Legacy of Canudos in the Contemporary Photobook in Brazil.’ In The Limits of the Human in Latin American Visual Culture. Ed. by Paul Merchant and Lucy Bollington. Florida University Press. 257-278.
- King, E. 2017. Posthumanism, Technology and the Graphic Novel in Latin America, with Joanna Page. London: UCL Press.
- King, E. 2015. Virtual Orientalism in Brazilian Culture. New York: Palgrave.