V.M. Braganza is a public-facing intellectual and book detective, and a PhD candidate in English at Harvard. She writes for Smithsonian, Lithub, Mental Floss, and the LA Review of Books. Her academic work has appeared in a variety of scholarly journals and volumes, including the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English. She was co-coordinator of Harvard's Renaissance Colloquium in 2020-21.

A curator whose past work includes programming at the Library of Congress, she is the lead curator of the exhibit 500 Years of Women Authors, Authorizing Themselves on display at Harvard’s Houghton Library until March 11, 2022 and digitally browsable here.

Formerly an Echols Scholar, Braganza graduated summa cum laude with a BA in Medieval and Renaissance Literature from the University of Virginia. She is a member of the Foundation of St. John's College, Cambridge, where she earned her MPhil with Distinction in Renaissance Literature. In 2022, Braganza was named a Harvard Horizons Scholar and a Bowdoin Prize recipient. She is also a JD candidate at Columbia Law School where she specializes in constitutional law.

Her first book project is titled The Secret-Seekers: Renaissance Writers and the Birth of Code.