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.

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

by Rui Tavares

The Saab Center for Portuguese Studies, in partnership with the History Department, announces a lecture by Rui Tavares, noted historian and the Luso-American Foundation Visiting Distinguished Lecturer at Brown University in Fall 2018, titled “The ‘Enlightened’ Censor: The Paradoxes of the 18th-Century European Cultural Revolution as seen from Portugal,” on Friday, December 7 at 12 noon in Allen House. Parking in Wilder Lot, across from 61 Wilder Street.

This lecture will examine the work of 18th-century Portuguese censors during the regime of the Marquis of Pombal, the renowned Portuguese leader credited with introducing Enlightenment ideals into Portuguese society and culture. As the censors permit or forbid books by Voltaire, Rousseau or Locke, and also sermons, plays and academic treatises, could the censorship, imbued with elements of the Enlightenment, be regarded as an “enlightened” censorship more than an anti-Enlightenment project? The answer to this question will allow us to better understand the difficult birth of modernity and pluralism and the challenges both face today.

Rui Tavares is an author, essayist and politician. He is the author of eight books on Portuguese history and politics and on the European Union, and was a member of the European Parliament from 2009 to 2014. He is currently a member of the Portuguese Parliament and the founder of the political party Livre. He is also a public intellectual whose regular column appears in the influential newspaper Público.

Fall 2018 Events

• A Conversation with the Actor Joaquim de Almeida - Wed., Nov. 28
• Readings and Conversations with Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist & Writer Diana Marcum - Wed., Oct. 10

Previous Events

• Gulbenkian / Saab Visiting Professorship in Portuguese Studies Program
• Apply to be the new Visiting Lecturer in Portuguese Studies

See all our announcements.

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