Daniel da Silva is Assistant Professor of Portuguese at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. He completed his Ph.D. in Latin American and Iberian Cultures from Columbia University in 2019. His research explores queer subjectivities, music, sound, and performance in Luso-Afro-Brazilian cultures. His first monograph, Transounding, will be released by Duke University Press on Jan 5, 2027, part of the Dissident Acts Series edited by Diana Taylor and Macarena Gómez-Barris.
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Based in New York City, Silva was born in Newark, New Jersey’s Ironbound neighborhood, to Portuguese parents from Murtosa, in Portugal’s Aveiro district. His experience and expressions of difference within a Luso-American diaspora inform his research and pedagogy. He is a musician with two recorded albums and a decade of experience in music marketing, supporting independent, queer, and world music artists.
Questions of identity and expression have guided his trajectory from performance to research. Listening for what is different and dissonant in otherwise normative cultural and institutional terrains is both a methodology and a commitment. His scholarship establishes a nexus of study at the intersection of Lusophone cultures, queer and trans subjectivities, and the sonic life of diaspora, sustaining a praxis of inquiry and analysis attuned to people, places, histories, and desires that may otherwise go unheard.
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Daniel da Silva, Ph.D. 