Janek Scholz is a research assistant at the Portuguese-Brazilian Institute at the University of Cologne. He studied Romance languages and literature, German as a foreign language and English linguistics in Jena, spent one year as an Erasmus student at the Università degli Studi di Napoli, L'Orientale and worked as a language assistant for the German Academic Exchange Service at the Universidade Federal do Ceará in Fortaleza. From January 2018 to December 2020, he completed a doctoral programme at the University of Vienna with Prof. Dr. Kathrin Sartingen and obtained his PhD in December 2020 with a thesis on the figure of the cartomancer in Brazilian literature. His current research project focuses on transsexuality in Romance-language contemporary literature; other interests include Brazilian and Luso-African comics, narrative hegemony, and Luso-Italian literary relations.

Janek Scholz is Chairman of the Society for Science, Cultures and Economics of Portuguese Language Countries (GLPS e.V.), the supporting organisation of the Centre for the Portuguese-Speaking World (Centro Mundo Lusófono) at the University of Cologne.