Mark Curran

Mark Curran taught Spanish and Portuguese languages and their respective cultures at Arizona State University for 43 years. His studies, travel, research, and teaching have been in Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Peru, Portugal, Spain, Uruguay, and Argentina.

Mark’s main interest over the years has been Brazil, and he has made 20 trips to that country for study, travel, and research on both its folk-popular poetry, “a literatura de cordel,” and erudite literature with most time spent in Recife, Salvador, and Rio de Janeiro. Research has resulted in 14 books published on the topic in Brazil, Spain, and the United States. In Adventures of a ‘Gringo’ Researcher in Brazil in the 1960s (2012) Mark recounts day to day living along with the cultural and political moments of those times. In A Portrait of Brazil in the Twentieth Century – the Universe of the ‘Literatura de Cordel (2013) he highlights the folk-popular poets and poetry itself.

In retirement Mark has written books of travel, teaching, and research in Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Portugal, and Spain. Personal stories followed telling of growing up on the family farm in Kansas and seven years of study with the Jesuits. 

His most recent cultural presentations during retirement were at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the Brazilian Endowment of the Arts in New York City, and as a cultural specialist on Lindblad-National Geographic expeditions in South America.