The Brazilian Atlantic: Architectural Circulation, Return, and Translation

You are cordially invited to attend the lecture by Ana Gisele Ozaki:

Date: 2 February 2026

Time:18:00—20:00

Venue: SDE1, Level 3, School Conference Room

The Brazilian Atlantic: Architectural Circulation, Return, and Translation

This talk positions the Brazilian Atlantic as an architectural terrain shaped by trans-Atlantic movement, return, and translation between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It follows how architectural forms, spatial practices, and climatic techniques linked to Brazil’s plantation worlds, domestic layouts, verandahs, urban morphologies, and service infrastructures, travelled unevenly across the Atlantic into West and Southern Africa. In Nigeria and Angola, Afro-Brazilian returnees reworked these architectures to assert social recognition and belonging, while Portuguese colonial architects later redeployed similar spatial logics as instruments of governance and settler futurity, respectively. Read through a Black feminist lens, the talk reveals how architecture mediated competing visions of race, climate, and modernity across the Atlantic.

Ana Gisele Ozaki is an architectural historian and Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Architectural History at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research examines the transoceanic circulation of architectural forms, climatic strategies, and spatial practices across Brazil, Africa, and the wider Atlantic world, with particular attention to plantation environments. Integrating archival research with Black feminist theory, her work rethinks modern architecture through questions of climate, labour, domesticity, and colonial governance.