Research Bio
Nathaniel Wolfson is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Affiliated Faculty of the Program in Critical Theory and the Berkeley Center for New Media. His teaching and research focus on literature, visual art, media and critical theory, especially of Brazil and Latin America. Among his research interests are poetry and poetics, politics and aesthetics, translation, anthropology, critical media studies, and post-colonial theory.
His book Concrete Encoded: Poetry, Design, and the Cybernetic Imaginary in Brazil published in 2025 by the University of Texas Press, explores the crossings of avant-garde writing, design, and critical technological thought in Brazil in the 1940s through the 1970s. Concretism has long been considered Brazil’s most global aesthetic movement. In Concrete Encoded, Wolfson argues that concrete poetry is the quintessential literary genre of the early information age. He shows that Brazilian poets, artists, and designers confronted a cybernetic imaginary with aesthetic responses to an advancing capitalist and digital era. Vigorous experimentalists, their attention to form and semantics unveiled both the creative and nefarious possibilities of cybernetics.
Wolfson has published articles in journals and edited volumes on a wide range of topics. Among these, he recently published two catalogue essays for MASP (Museo de Arte Moderna de São Paulo); the first on Mário de Andrade, for the exhibition Mário de Andrade: duas vidas (2024), which explores the modernist poet's studies of Brazilian grammar through the lens of queer theory ("The Dance of Pronouns: Mário de Andrade's Queer Grammar"); the second, on Brazilian modernist painter, Alfredo Volpi, for the exhibition Volpi Popular (2022) at the Museo de Arte Moderna de São Paulo. The article asks why Volpi turned away from a “regionalist” approach to local popular culture, marked by figurative representations of street characters, towards abstract and denuded scenes. “Scenes without Characters” argues that Volpi wished to distance himself from politically reactionary appropriations of popular culture by São Paulo elites, yet without abandoning his engagement with his surrounding social worlds.
Wolfson is the editor of a special issue on the “Legacies of Concrete Aesthetics” in the Journal of Lusophone Studies (2020). He has written for the contemporary art magazine Flash Art International.
For a complete list and PDFs of other publications see his Academia.com page.
Before coming to UC Berkeley, he taught at Harvard University as a post-doctoral fellow. Prior to that he studied at Princeton University, where he obtained an M.A. and Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese, and Brown University, where he received his B.A. in Comparative Literature.
Research Expertise and Interest
Brazilian literature and culture, Latin American literature and culture, Latin American Art History, media studies, critical theory, environmental humanities, Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Caribbean Literatures and Cultures, visual studies