Lecturing and touring in João Pessoa

On Wednesday, Chuck Bazerman and I both gave lectures to the graduate program in foreign languages in the Department of Linguistics Universidade Federal de Paraíba in João Pessoa, the capital city of Paraíba state. The city was named after the populist politician João Pessoa after his assassination in 1930. Like Recife, João Pessoa is right on the coast, with several miles of beachfront, but unlike Recife, the city has limited construction so that there are few high-rise buildings right on the beach. The city also has several large nature preserves and prides itself on being one of the "greenest" cities in the world. The best information I've found about the city is at Wikipedia.

For our talks there was an audience of about 50 people, both students and faculty; the level of English was quite high, and there were good questions and discussions afterwards, with a surprising amount of interest in the rather formal presentation I gave of parts of the paper about genre change and stability in blogging. Chuck talked about the history of writing and its connections with social systems, with lots of eye-catching images in his slides. His talk was related to his edited Handbook of Research on Writing, which has just been published by Routledge.

Our academic host was Dra. Bêtania Passos Medrado from the graduate specialization in English Linguistics and Literature in the Department of Modern Foreign Languages (I'm afraid this link will go just to a main page, from which finding the specific program description is difficult). After the presentations, she and several other faculty took us (Carl was with us) on a sight-seeing tour, which included a view from what is claimed to be the eastern-most point of the Americas, Cabo Branco (White Cape). The photo shows a somewhat unkempt sign making this claim, and if you enlarge it you can see that the longitide is 37° 47' 40" West, and the latitude is 7° 09' 28" South. However, according to World 66 (an open-content travel site, so take it for what it's worth), erosion and movement of sand on the coast has moved the actual easternmost point somewhat to the south of this location.
We also went to the Centro Cultural de São Francisco in a church that has been converted to secular use. The church was originally built by the Franciscans in the late 16th century, and the current baroque structure was begun in the 17th century and completed in the 18th. It is considered to be one of the most important baroque structures in Brazil. The main altar and a side chapel are well preserved, with much of the ornament imported from Portugal (decorative tiles, carved altarpieces, and statuary) and some created in Brazil from indigenous materials, such as the choir stalls and carved exterior doors. Part of the structure is now a museum of contemporary and folk art, which was also interesting. Here's a picture of the oldest part of the structure, the courtyard of the contiguous St. Anthony's Convent. If you zoom in, you can see the well preserved Portuguese tiles both above the colonnade and behind it on the lower level.