Inauguration Event: Lídia Jorge Chair in Portuguese Studies

The Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies is pleased to officially inaugurate the Lídia Jorge Chair in Portuguese Studies on Tuesday, April 5 with the presence of the celebrated writer, who is visiting UMass Amherst for the first time.

The event will take place at ILC N400 from 4 to 5:30 p.m., followed by a reception ­at Amherst Room, on the 10th floor Campus Center.

Lídia Jorge is one of the most representative writers of the post-Revolution Generation in Portugal. Her books (fiction, theater, children's literature, essay and poetry) have won international recognition and have been translated into over twenty languages and published in many countries.

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She has been awarded a variety of literary awards, including the FIL Prize in Romance Languages in 2020, one of the most important literary prizes in Latin America.

The inaugural lecture titled “Lídia Jorge's Fiction and the Promise of Democracy” will be delivered by Ana Paula Ferreira, professor of Portuguese studies at the University of Minnesota.

Professor Ferreira has written extensively on Portuguese women writers, feminisms and colonialism/postcolonialism. Since the mid-1990s she has published articles and edited a collection of essays on the fiction of Lídia Jorge while also developing a project on the forgotten link between Portuguese women and late empire.

Her recent book “Women Writing Portuguese Colonialism in Africa” traces the agency of women as cultural producers since the end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth-first.