Founded in 2013, with generous gift from the Saab Family Fund, the Saab Center for Portuguese Studies promotes the multidisciplinary study of the language, literature and culture of the vast and varied Portuguese speaking world comprised of over 250 million people in eight countries on four continents and its diaspora.

Prof. Elsa Peralta, University of Lisbon and Brown University

Lisbon and the Memory of Empire: Reading the (Post-) Colonial City from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century

A lecture presented by The Saab Center for Portuguese Studies.

Wednesday, February 20, 2019 at 5 p.m.
O'Leary Library, South Campus, UMass Lowell

Parking in the Wilder Lot, across from 61 Wilder Street, Lowell, MA.

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

About Elsa Peralta

Prof. Elsa Peralta is research fellow at the Centre for Comparative Studies (CEC) at the University of Lisbon and FLAD/Michael Teague Visiting Lecturer at Brown University in Spring 2019. She has published widely on Portuguese empire and identity and is the curator of the exhibition “Return – Traces of Memory,” produced by the City of Lisbon.

More Information

For more information, call the Saab Center by phone at: 978-934-5199 or email: Natalia_Melo@uml.edu.

Prof. David Mendonça: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

An Historical Perspective on Community Resilience: The Case of the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake

A lecture presented by The Saab Center for Portuguese Studies in partnership with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Monday, February 25, 2019 at Noon
Allen House, South Campus, UMass Lowell

Parking in the Wilder Lot, across from 61 Wilder Street, Lowell, MA.

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

This talk presents the results of the first English-language study of how Portuguese communities outside Lisbon responded to the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, along with implications for cross-community studies of community resilience.

About David Mendonça

David Mendonça is an Associate Professor in the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY.

The lecture is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation that will be published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction.

The 1755 Lisbon Earthquake was a cataclysmic, country-wide event that precipitated a dramatic response in Europe concerning the management of potential disasters. Within Portugal, however, and with the exception of Lisbon, the response of Portuguese communities to the event has been largely unexplored, thus creating a gap in our understanding of the event and compromising our ability to learn from it. This talk presents the first English-language analysis of the results of a country-wide survey (conducted three months after the event) on the impact and response of Portuguese communities to the event. This analysis reveals implications for the study of how communities adapt (or fail to adapt) to disasters, as well for the development of methods for empirically-grounded comparative research on community resilience.

More Information

For more information, call the Saab Center by phone at: 978-934-5199 or email: Natalia_Melo@uml.edu.

The Saab Center for Portuguese Studies at UMass Lowell and the Lowell Memorial Auditorium are proud to present international music star Mariza on Saturday, April 20 at 7:30 p.m at the Lowell Memorial Auditorium. This event is part of a yearlong celebration of the Saab Center’s fifth anniversary and will mark the first time partnering with the Lowell Memorial Auditorium.  Proceeds from Sounds of Portugal: An Evening of Fado with Mariza will support activities like our student study abroad programs and campus and community cultural events. 

• Sponsorship opportunities
• Tickets

The Azores: 9 Islands | 9 Photographers

An Exhibition at University Crossing

March 6 - April 17, 2019

An initiative of Estação Imagem with support from the Government of the Autonomous Region of the Azores and presented by The Saab Center for Portuguese Studies.

Opening Reception

• Wednesday, March 6, 2019 at 5:30 p.m.
• Moloney Hall at University Crossing
• With a Keynote Address by Pedro Letria, noted artist and professor at Escola Superior de Artes e Design, Caldas da Rainha, Portugal

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Spread through nine different islands, the Azores archipelago in the mid-Atlantic is a space where humans and nature have learned to live together since the 15th century.

Due to centuries of geographic isolation and powerful geological events like volcanoes and earthquakes, these islands are places with a strong identity and distinct personalities, conveyed through the lens of nine major Portuguese photographers, each focusing on one island.

The artists capture landscapes, gestures and glaces that evoke culture and expressions of identity. The sea is a perennial background and unifying feature, the mists of which enshroud the Azores in mystery and a magical allure.

Featured Artists

• Luís Barra
• Pedro Letria
• Bruno Portela
• Luís Ramos
• José Manuel Ribeiro
• Daniel Rocha
• José António Rodrigues
• Gonçalo Rosa da Silva
• Luís Casconcelos

More Information

For more information, call the Saab Center by phone at: 978-934-5199 or email: Natalia_Melo@uml.edu.

Graça Índias Cordeiro

Graça Índias Cordeiro, professor of Urban Anthropology at ISCTE-University Institute of Lisbon, is Inaugural Gulbenkian/Saab Visiting Professor in Portuguese Studies at UMass Lowell.

Graça Índias Cordeiro, professor of Urban Anthropology at ISCTE-University Institute of Lisbon, is the inaugural Gulbenkian/Saab Visiting Professor in Portuguese Studies in Spring Semester 2019. Prof. Cordeiro will teach “Cultures of the World: Portuguese Society Culture” in the Department of Sociology and a seminar titled “The Portuguese-speaking World and Its Diaspora in Massachusetts” in the Honors College. Both courses will count toward the minor in Portuguese Studies. Prof. Índias Cordeiro is director of the doctoral program in Urban Studies at ISCTE-University Institute of Lisbon and an affiliate of the Center for Research and Studies in Sociology. She is the author, editor or co-editor of eight books, and has been guest editor of eight special issues in academic journals in her field. She has published over sixty book chapters and peer-reviewed articles, and has been visiting professor at universities in the United States, Spain and Brazil. Her research focus is on social classifications, language and ethnicity, street and neighborhoods, and urban social history. In recent years she has conducted research in Boston on the Portuguese-speaking the intersection of language, ethnicity, and place in Portuguese-speaking communities, which has resulted in essays such as “An Immigrant in America, Yes, But Not an Emigrant in My Own Country! The Unbearable Weight of a Persistent Label,” in New and Old Routes of Portuguese Immigration (at press), “Neither Slum nor Élite Suburb: The Emergence of a Portuguese Colony in Cambridge, MA, in the early 20th century,” in Migration and Mill Work: Portuguese Communities in Industrial New England (at press), and “Belongings and Interactions: Negotiating Portuguese-speaking Identities in Boston,” in Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies 26 (2014). During her tenure at UMass Lowell Prof. Indias Cordeiro will expand her research into Lowell and environs and promote student research in this region.

The University of Massachusetts Lowell is grateful to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and Elisia and Mark Saab and family for co-sponsoring the Gulbenkian / Saab Visiting Professor in Portuguese Studies Program.

See The Spring 2019 Portuguese Courses

To see many more photos from our News and Events please visit our Photo Galleries webpage.