When Steven Butterman was in college, he took a trip that changed the course of his life.
A class in Portuguese piqued his interest, and when the professor mentioned an opportunity to join a U.S. Fulbright-Hayes trip overseas, Butterman applied.
Soon, Butterman was on a flight to Brazil. He spent the summer living with a family in Belo Horizonte, in the southeastern part of the country.
At the time, Butterman was a Spanish major. Yet, through his experience in South America’s largest nation, Butterman’s interests evolved. He was enchanted with the language, cultural vibrance, and music of Brazil. Shortly after returning to the University of Colorado Boulder, he added a Portuguese minor to his Latin American Studies concentration.
“I loved Portuguese at first sight,” said Butterman, now a professor in the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences Michele Bowman Underwood Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and self-declared “brasilófilo.”
With Portuguese being the sixth most spoken language in the world, Butterman said he “was intrigued by the sounds of the language and the Lusophone literary and cultural traditions across the world on four continents. I’ve been a Brazil nut ever since.”
Today, Butterman leads the Portuguese program at the College of Arts and Sciences, where he teaches classes in the language and specializes in Brazilian literature and culture, as well as the wider Portuguese-speaking world. It’s a role he has thrived in for 24 years. During that time, Butterman also helped develop and lead the University ’s Gender and Sexuality Studies program, after recognizing his interest in studying marginalized populations in Brazil. Today, he has merged those two interests in his research.
“Steve Butterman is one of the leading voices in the nation on Brazilian cultural studies and the study of diverse communities within Brazil,” said Logan Connors, professor of French and chair of the Michele Bowman Underwood Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. “He has written chapters and books about the LGBTQ+ community in Brazil as well as its literature, media, art, and activism.”
As a result of his global interests, Butterman earned his own Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to conduct research in Brazil two years ago. And recently, Butterman was chosen as one of the nation’s 13 Fulbright U.S. Scholar Alumni Ambassadors. In this role, he will spend the next two years speaking to faculty and staff members at colleges across the United States about the value of a U.S. Fulbright experience abroad.
“My Fulbright was transformative in every sense of the word,” he said, noting that he was asked to speak at the U.S. Ambassador’s office in Brazil for Pride Month and at a film screening on the “Lavender Scare” while he was there. “With a Fulbright award, you are introduced to people, including politicians, artists, and activists, and you have conversations that you may not have had without the influence of these connection makers.”
Butterman said he was attracted to the Fulbright program because he believes in its mission to build mutual understanding between countries across the world. He saw its benefits at the University, where he has recruited many Fulbright teaching assistants to spend an academic year at the Coral Gables Campus and complement Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, and Portuguese classes with their own native knowledge.
“It’s very much in his being to facilitate and boost cultural exchanges—whether it’s among undergraduate students, graduate students, or faculty,” Connors added.
While Butterman’s fascination with Brazil and its unique culture arose during his first trip to the nation in 1992, since then, he has learned much more. For instance, Butterman explored Brazil’s early acceptance of gender-fluid culture and noticed its contrast with widespread conservative politics and norms. He learned that the nation’s early tolerance for queer culture even predated the gay rights movement in the United States. This helped Butterman create the University’s first LGBTQ+ Studies course with a global and interdisciplinary lens.
“Brazil is very paradoxical because it hosts the largest pride parade in the world in São Paulo every year, yet it also maintains the largest percentage of murders of LGBTQ+ people, and it is the most transphobic nation, with the highest number of assassinations in the world,” he said.
This contradiction was among the topics of his first three books and many academic journal articles. For his next book, Butterman is writing about the experience of LGBTQIA+ Brazilians who successfully achieve asylum in the United States. Many of these individuals leave Brazil because of the relentless persecution and danger they endure if they identify as transgender, gay, lesbian, or bisexual. He recognized the issue firsthand while volunteering at a safe haven for trans Brazilians on his Fulbright in 2022.
“It was a horrific experience to see so much suffering and rejection, but it also gave me a chance to meet and interact with human beings who experience loss and grief, along with success, happiness, and disappointment,” Butterman said.
Butterman returned to the U.S. and continued volunteering as an expert witness in several immigration asylum cases. It is something he still does to help prevent these individuals from being forced to return to a perilous situation.
Since this year’s Fulbright Scholar Program aims to attract scholars from a broader range of institutions, Butterman hopes that his own experiences will encourage more faculty members to take a chance and apply.
“I’m going to go out there to talk about these experiences that have transformed my life and try to empower people who do not have the privileges I’ve had to realize that they are viable Fulbright candidates,” he said. “As someone who believes in inclusivity and diversity more than rhetorical buzzwords, the fact that Fulbright’s goals align with my own makes me even more devoted to its mission.”
The Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program is funded by the U.S. Department of State. It began in 1946, and today, both student and U.S. Scholar awards are granted annually to allow students and faculty and staff members at higher education institutions the ability to do research or teach English abroad.
