Sophia Beal is an Associate Professor of Portuguese in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the University of Minnesota, USA. Beal is the author of Brazil under Construction: Fiction and Public Works (Palgrave Macmillan 2013) and co-editor (along with Bruce Robbins and Michael Rubenstein) of Infrastructuralism, a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies, published in 2015. The Portuguese translation of Brazil under Construction was published in 2017.
Since May 2015, she has been an International Collaborator of the Contemporary Brazilian Literature Research Group, a Brazilian federally-funded initiative. She earned her PhD in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies from Brown University and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Tulane University in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.