This post is part of the Meet the ETCL Team series, which introduces the wonderful people who work in the lab and who have worked with us in the past.
In a hole in the ground there lived… Leonardo? — or Leo, as he often calls himself while living abroad in Canada. This hole was Ajuricaba, Leo’s original place on Earth, a tiny but cozy town in the northwestern part of Brazil’s southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul.
In January 2026, Leo joined ETCL as a Mitacs Globalink research intern following the completion of a project to translate the HSSCommons interface into Portuguese. During his time in the lab, he has been watching the bare winter trees sprout leaves and blossoms while studying Digital Humanities, open social scholarship, and the role of Artificial Intelligence in this context, as well as mapping the Brazilian DH community and building connections within it. It didn’t take long for Leo to fall in love with the research and the lab, but also with British Columbia and its people, its animals, its landscapes—its life. Although he may be an easy lover, he is not easily impressed; yet here, he has been impressed.
Back in 2020, Leo’s post-secondary education began when he accepted the Grey Wizard’s invitation to join an undergraduate program in Journalism, moving to Porto Alegre, the state capital, just before a certain virus swept across the world. After three years, Leo realized that writing in a journalistic style was simply not in his nature. Reality—or at least the way it is commonly portrayed in journalistic writing—was not for him. Fiction had always been his true calling.
Thankfully, Leo was lucky enough to be living in the only Brazilian city that had a university with an undergraduate program in Creative Writing, which he started attending after deciding to abandon Journalism. There, at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), he joined the Japanese Literature Study Group, through which he later became part of the Digital Humanities Lab, contributing to the development of the lab’s first research projects. The largest project Leo contributed to was a mapping of all Japanese literature ever translated into Portuguese and published in Brazil, for which the team has already gathered more than 350 entries. In the northern fall of 2025, he flew on the back of the giant eagle to Japan for the first time to present the results of this research alongside his supervisor.
Beyond his academic and research work at ETCL, Leo’s interests orbit around language, literature and creative writing, going from translating or analyzing texts and literary pieces to writing fantastic literature or essays on animal studies, anthropomorphism and childhood memories. His best writing companion is Frodo, his 11-year-old schnauzer. Leo loves dogs, and, although he also has a turtle called Romeu, he thinks dogs are the best company for a lot of things: horror films in the middle of the night, books in the winter, afternoon naps, running from orcs at sunset…
He also loves oil painting and taking care of his plants — a tranquil time at his very well-organized home is just too precious to not be obsessed with. However, one of his biggest passions in life is music, which connects him deeply to parties, clubs, concerts and festivals. He can be a very social person: take him for a beer at The Prancing Pony and see.