Lowell, Massachusetts. 

The Luso-American Foundation of Lisbon, Portugal, and the Saab-Pedroso Center for Portuguese Culture and Research at the University of Massachusetts Lowell announce the Luso-American Foundation/UMass Lowell College of Fine Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Visiting Professor in Portuguese Studies Program, underwritten in part by Elisia Saab and Luis Pedroso.

     The Visiting Professor in Portuguese Studies Program will bring Portuguese scholars to UMass Lowell over the next three academic years. The Visiting Professor will teach in the areas of history and the social sciences and support the development of a minor and a major in Portuguese Studies. The program launches in the Spring Semester 2015 with Dr. Ana Valdez, postdoctoral fellow in History at Yale University and researcher at the Centre for History at the University of Lisbon. Prof. Valdez, author of Historical Interpretations of the “Fifth Empire”: The Dynamics of Periodization from Daniel to António Vieira, SJ (Brill, 2011), will teach a course in the UMass Lowell History Department, titled “The First Globalization: The Portuguese and the Age of Discovery” (History 43.390.201, T/Th, 2:00-3:15; classes begin on January 20, 2015), and will collaborate in various initiatives of the Saab-Pedroso Center, including the delivery of a public lecture, “Empire, Religion, and Utopia in the Early Modern Portuguese World,” on Tuesday, March 31 at 5:30 p.m. at the Allen House, in partnership with the History Department.     The University of Massachusetts Lowell is grateful to the Luso-American Foundation for its generous support of this academic initiative and looks forward to a long-term partnership in the promotion of the Saab-Pedroso Center for Portuguese Culture and Research and the Portuguese Studies Program in the Department of World Languages and Culture.     

About the Saab-Pedroso Center for Portuguese Culture & Research

Founded in 2013, with generous gifts from the Saab Family Fund and Luís Pedroso, the Saab-Pedroso Center for Portuguese Culture & Research promotes the multidisciplinary study of the language, literatures and cultures of the vast and varied Portuguese speaking world comprised of over 230 million people in eight countries on four continents and its diaspora. 

The Center, administered under the aegis of the Dean of the College of Fine Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at UMass Lowell, organizes and co-organizes colloquia, workshops, exhibitions, visits by distinguished writers from the Lusophone world and Portuguese North America, lectures, theater and dance performances, concerts, and film screenings. It also sponsors and co-sponsors research on collections of documents related to the diaspora. 

The Center fosters Luso-Afro-Brazilian studies across the UMass Lowell campus and functions as a liaison between the University of Massachusetts Lowell and other institutions involved in Portuguese and Lusophone studies in the United States and abroad. 

The Center promotes outreach efforts in areas such as the arts, K-12 education, economic development, health and politics, and civic engagement related to the Portuguese speaking communities of the United States, while also sponsoring and co-sponsoring research on the Lusophone world, especially on the Portuguese-speaking communities in Massachusetts in general and the Merrimack Valley in particular. 

For more information, please visit

 www.uml.edu/international-programs/Portuguese 

Saab-Pedroso Center for Portuguese Culture and Research

UMass Lowell

Dugan Hall 

103883 Broadway Street

Lowell, MA, 

01854978-934-5199

Frank F. Sousa is Professor of Portuguese in the Department of Cultural Studies and founding director of the Saab-Pedroso Center for Portuguese Culture & Research at UMass Lowell. He is the author of O Segredo de Eça(Edições Cosmos, 1996), an often-cited book on Eça de Queirós, Portugal’s foremost 19th century writer. He is presently working on a critical edition of Eça’s A cidade e as serras, to be published by Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, Portugal’s leading academic publisher, and is under contract for a second single-author monograph on Eça de Queirós with É Realizações Editora, São Paulo. 
He was founding director of Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth (1998-2014), a partner of the University Press of New England, where press he was also general editor of the Portuguese in the Americas Series (2003-2014), and the Adamastor Series (2011-2014). He has twice been a Fulbright Scholar at the National Library in Lisbon, Portugal. 
Before coming to UMass Lowell in January 2014, he was at UMass Dartmouth, where he proposed and led the campaigns to create the Summer Program in Portuguese (1994), the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture (1996), the Department of Portuguese (2000), the Hélio and Amélia Pedroso/Luso-American Foundation Endowed Chair in Portuguese Studies (2001), the Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives (2005-2009), and the Portuguese-American Newspaper Digitization Initiative (2007-2009). He was a member of the Board of Directors of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, now MassHumanites (2003-2009), was designated a Comendador da Ordem do Infante D. Henrique by the Government of Portugal in 1997 and awarded the Medalha de Mérito by the Government of the Autonomous Region of the Azores in 2010.