Patrícia Martinho Ferreira

Assistant Professor

Patrícia holds a B.A. in Modern Languages and Literatures (2005) and a M.A. in Theory and Narrative Analysis (2009) from University of Coimbra (Portugal), an M.Ed. in Teaching Portuguese as Foreign and Second Language from University of Porto (Portugal), and a Ph.D. in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies (2018) from Brown University .

Prior to coming to UMass Amherst, she taught at UMass Lowell and Brown University. She served as the Director of the Camões Lectureship at University of Bucharest (2006-2009) and at Georgetown University (2009-2012), where she taught Portuguese language and Lusophone cultures, and curated academic and cultural events.

Her work has been published in Hispania, Transmodernity, and the Journal of Lusophone Studies (formerly ellipsis), among other venues. She has recently co-edited volume 40 (June 2019) of Cadernos de Literatura Comparada for the Institute for Comparative Literature Margarida Losa, entitled “Transatlantic Voices: The Literary Atlantic in Perspective” .

Her monograph Órfãos do Império. Heranças Coloniais na Literatura Portuguesa Contemporânea (University of Lisbon - ISC Press, 2021) seeks to analyze the literary trope of the orphan in contemporary fiction that constitutes a critical revisiting of the end of Portuguese colonialism in Africa and the consequences of the decolonization process as they relate to a renegotiation of cultural identity. 

Research Areas

Lusophone Literatures
Postcolonial Studies
Memory and Trauma Studies
Literature and Urban Space
Visual Culture and Film
Sound Studies
 

Courses Recently Taught

PORTG 597 – Post-Colonial Literatures in Portuguese
PORTG 397/FILM 397 – Portuguese Speaking World in Film
PORTG 321 – Short Stories of the Lusophone World
PORTG 315 – Portuguese Civilization: History through the Arts
PORTG 312 – Advanced Composition
PORTG 311 – Advanced Grammar
PORTG 302 – Advanced Conversation