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Title
Date(s)
- 1981-2014 (predominant 1995-2014) (Creation)
Level of description
Fonds
Extent and medium
0.65 m of textual records (5 boxes)
Context area
Name of creator
Biographical history
Ricardo da Silveira Lobo Sternberg, Professor Emeritus of the University of Toronto, was a Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He taught courses on Brazilian and Portuguese literature between his appointment in 1979 and his retirement in 2015. His main research interests are Brazilian and Portuguese literature and literary figures. Sternberg is also a poet. Four collections of his poetry have been published, and his poems have appeared frequently in poetry magazines and anthologies.
Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1948, Ricardo Sternberg moved with his family to the United States in 1963, where he received his B.A. in English literature from the University of California, Riverside (1971). He received his M.A. (1975) and Ph.D. (1978) in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. He was a Junior Fellow with the Society of Fellows at Harvard University between 1975 and 1978.
Professor Sternberg was appointed to the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor in 1978, and was cross-appointed to the Centre for Comparative Literature from 1984 until 1998. He became an Associate Professor in 1984 and a Professor in 1998. He was a Graduate Advisor for the Centre for Comparative Literature from 1986 to 1998, and the President of the Research Development Commission from 1988 to 1991. From 2004-2005, Professor Sternberg was Acting Director for the Centre for Comparative Literature, and Acting Chair (2007-2008) and Interim Chair (2009-2010) for the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He became a Professor Emeritus upon retirement in 2015.
He has taught several undergraduate and graduate courses in Brazilian and Portuguese literature, with a focus on 19th and 20th century Luso-Brazilian literature, and literary figures such as Eça de Queirós, Machado de Assis, and José Saramago.
Professor Sternberg has researched and written extensively on Brazilian and Portuguese literature, literary figures and their works, having numerous articles published in scholarly journals. He has also translated the works of poets such as Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Jorge de Lima, and João Cabral de Melo Neto.
He is also a poet. His poems have appeared in magazines such as The Paris Review, The Nation, Poetry (Chicago), Descant, American Poetry Review, The Virginia Quarterly and Ploughshares, as well as in anthologies of Canadian and Latin American literature. He also has four published collections of his work: The Invention of Honey. Montreal: Vehicule (1990); Map of Dreams. Montreal: Vehicule (1996), Bamboo Church. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press (1996); and Some Dance. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press (2014). He received the National Discovery Prize in 1974, the Pushcart Prize in 1978, and the ‘Blues’ award for Best Canadian Poetry in English in 2012.
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Content and structure area
Scope and content
Personal records of Professor Ricardo Sternberg, documenting his career as a professor of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Toronto and his published work on subjects in Portuguese and Brazilian literature. The contents of the fonds primarily cover courses taught between the mid-1990s and 2014, and articles published in the 1980s to the early 2000s. The fonds provides a significant record of Portuguese literary themes, figures and works taught and written about by Ricardo Sternberg.
These records include course lecture notes, annotated Portuguese and Brazilian literary works, course packs, course syllabi and assignments, pamphlets for lectures given, and his published articles.
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Accruals
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The fonds is organized into series and files based upon the binders used to house the material when it first arrived at the archives.
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Open
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Dates of creation revision deletion
-Original finding aid by Zoe Weber, March, 2016
-Added to AtoM by Karen Suurtamm, June 2016