Joana is reading for the DPhil in Area Studies (Latin America) at the University of Oxford. Supervised by Professor Leigh Payne, her research looks at the role of state in feminicide in contemporary Brazil, using an approach that mixes critical International Relations theory and feminist phenomenology. She is studying at Oxford with the suport of the Baillie Gifford AHRC Scholarship as part of the Open Oxford-Cambridge DTP.
Joana graduated with a BA First Class Honours in International Relations from the University of Sussex (2017), where she focused particularly on the intersections of gender, violence and security. In 2018, she received a MSt in Women's Studies from the University of Oxford, and achieved a distinction in her dissertation, which compared Brazilian media discourse on gender violence and Brazilian women's literature in the same topic from the 1970s to the 2010s.