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Name: Raquel Luciana De Souza
Home country: Brazil
I am an Afro-Brazilian Fulbright student. I was born in Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, where I majored in Language Teaching and Translation (English/Portuguese) at the Federal University of Ouro Preto (UFOP). I then moved to Belo Horizonte where I studied for over two years in the Masters degree program on Translation Studies at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). While in Belo Horizonte, I also worked as a volunteer in a municipal secretariat for black community affairs (SMACON), whose primary goal was to develop strategies to help Afro-Brazilians integrate into the mainstream Brazilian society. Currently, I am at the University of Maryland, in my first semester of the American Studies graduate program. My main interests are popular culture, especially film, gender, ethnicity and identity throughout the African Diaspora and I am particularly interested in comparative analyses of African-American/ Afro-Brazilian history and culture.