DPhil Student
Clara Fortes Brandão is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Her research examines the history and contemporary political projects of the Kajkwakhrattxi, an Indigenous people in Brazilian Amazonia. Her thesis explores how narratives of ancestral culture, mobility, and place-making inform their efforts to secure land rights and rebuild collective autonomy after territorial dispossession and near ethnocide in the 1970s.
Her broader interests include Amazonian ethnology, Indigenous history, territory, land rights, memory, and the anthropology of space and time. The research is supervised by Dr Elizabeth Ewart and supported by the SAME Doctoral Scholarship and the Wenner-Gren Wadsworth Fellowship. In the 2025–2026 academic year, she was a Visiting Student Research Collaborator at the Brazil Lab, Princeton University.
Before joining Oxford, Clara completed an MA in Social Anthropology at the Museu Nacional of Rio de Janeiro, where she researched Kajkwakhrattxi kinship and onomastics. Her master’s research was supported by a National Geographic Society Early Career Grant, and she was awarded the FAPERJ Nota 10 Scholarship. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and has worked on projects on Indigenous land use and occupancy with Anishnaabeg communities in Ontario, Canada (as a Mitacs Globalink intern at Lakehead University), as well as on Lévi-Strauss’s Mythologiques as a research assistant to Prof. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Her engagement with anthropology began during secondary school, when she worked as a research assistant on a project on Rio’s suburban history led by Prof. Julia O’Donnel at Fundação Getúlio Vargas.
Email: clara.fortesbrandao@anthro.ox.ac.uk
