November 13, 2014. Lowell, Massachusetts.
The new program will be launched in Spring Semester 2015 with historian Ana Valdez, postdoctoral fellow at Yale University and researcher at the Centre for History at the University of Lisbon. Prof. Valdez will teach Topics in History 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). This course offers an introduction to the history of the Portuguese world since the foundation of the Kingdom of Portugal in 1143, with particular focus on the first European imperial cycle of the modern era, a period often called the “Age of Discovery.” The lectures, readings, and discussions in this course will illustrate Portugal’s history and its role in the world’s first movement of globalization: the expansion from the Iberian Peninsula into Africa, the Americas and Asia, including the arrival of the first Europeans in Japan in 1543.
Prof. Ana Valdez’s scholarship focuses on the intellectual and religious history of the Iberian world, with emphasis on the history of the Portuguese Atlantic. She has published widely on apocalyptic literature and its contributions to the development of imperial ideology in the Iberian world, including the book Historical Interpretations of the “Fifth Empire”: The Dynamics of Periodization from Daniel to António Vieira, SJ (Brill, 2011). She has taught at Brown, Columbia and Yale.
The Portuguese Program in the Department of Cultural Studies at UMass Lowell will offer three language courses in Spring Semester 2015, two in first-year and one in intermediate Portuguese-namely, 53.113.201: Portuguese 1 and Culture (M/W, 11:00-12:15); 53.114.201: Portuguese 2 and Culture, T/Th, 11:00-12:15; and 53.214.201 Portuguese 4 and Culture (T/Th, 12:30-1:45). Two of the language courses will be taught by Márcia Mendes, Fulbright Teaching Assistant in Portuguese for Academic Year 2014-15.
The program will also offer a film studies course, 53.304.201: Survey of Brazilian, Portuguese, and Lusophone African Cinema, on Tuesdays, 3:30-6:20. This course is sponsored by the Camões Institute and will be taught by José Rodrigues, Camões Institute Lecturer at Boston College.
For more information, please visit http://www.uml.edu/registrar/
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.
