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Bio
Bárbara Inês Ribeiro Simões Daibert, Ph.D.
Bárbara Simões was born in Minas Gerais, Brazil. As the daughter of a German-Jewish-Portuguese immigrant father, and a Brazilian mother who is a granddaughter of the Tupinambá nation, Bárbara grew up in Brazil and became an Assistant Professor at Federal University of Juiz de Fora in 2012.
Experiencing her country’s racial conflicts from an early age, she completed her PhD in Comparative Literature, focusing her studies and research on critical race theory and the African diaspora. Invited by the president of UFJF to join the administrative team, Bárbara became Dean of International Relations at UFJF in 2016, a position she held for five years, and which projected her gaze to other universities around the world. In 2022, Bárbara became a Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto, Canada, where she currently lectures, works on her research, and works on her creative writing.
Bárbara published her first novel in 2019, Firmina, by Malê, a publishing house in Brazil that focuses on Afro-Brazilian books. Firmina is a historical novel that fictionalizes the life of the first black female writer in the Americas to write an abolitionist novel, Maria Firmina dos Reis. In 2021, Bárbara published Guinevere, fictionalizing the Arthurian tales from the female perspective of King Arthur’s legendary adulterous wife.
In 2024, she published Rosa Egipcíaca, Afeto de Deus ( Rosa Egipcíaca, God’s Affection). This novel fictionalizes the life of an enslaved African woman who lived in Brazil in the 18th century, and ended up dying in Portugal, where she had been taken by the Inquisition. Intricately linking Angola, Brazil and Portugal, Barbara re-images the transatlantic slave traffic and the complexities of the Black Diaspora.
Bárbara’s creative writing also includes a collection of children’s books, inspired by the stories she made up for her children, published in 2016. Currently, as a visiting professor, she has focused her research on critical race theory, decoloniality and Latino-Canadian literature and studies.
