News and Events

Spring 2025 FLAD/Saab Lecture

When: Wednesday, April 2, 2025 at 5 p.m.>
Where: Allen House, 2 Solomont Way (South Campus)
and via Zoom
Free and open to the public

Music has long been a tool of power, shaping identities and political influence. In Portugal, it reinforced royal authority, aided missionary work, served as diplomatic currency, and influenced alliances and power dynamics.

This lecture explores how music in Portugal has functioned as a force of persuasion, control and resistance across history, in a deep entanglement with economic, social and political structures.

Inês Thomas Almeida specializes in historical musicology, women’s studies and cultural history. Her research focuses on 18th century music, women’s musical practices, travel accounts and transnational cultural networks. She leads the project “Female Music Practice in 18th-Century Portugal,” sponsored by the Foundation for Science and Technology of the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education. Her publications include Vamos correr riscos: textos escolhidos de Madalena de Azeredo Perdigão (2023), co-edited with Rui Vieira Nery, and “Musical Practices of Women in the Late 18th Century Around Marie-Angélique and Jeanne-Renée de Bombelles” (Adepa, 2023).

For more information, write to frank_sousa@uml.edu.

Saturday, March 22, 2025

A Lecture by Katya Wesolowski of Duke University

Monday, September 23, 2024

Presented by the Saab Center for Portuguese Studies.

Capoeira, created in Brazil by enslaved Africans several hundred years ago and once criminalized, today is a popular practice around the world. A dynamic blend of play, fight, dance, acrobatics, music and ritual, capoeira brings together diverse practitioners across nationality, race, age and gender. This talk explores the connections, and at times disconnections, that capoeira has fostered throughout its history. Drawing on her thirty years of experience as a capoeira practitioner, ethnographer and instructor, Prof. Wesolowski offers some lessons that this embodied dialogue can teach us about being – and moving – together across and with difference.

About Katya Wesolowski

Katya Wesolowski is a lecturing fellow in Cultural Anthropology and Dance at Duke University. Her research and scholarship move through the African Diaspora, from Brazil to Angola, exploring the ways bodies in movement together can create spaces of radical openness and transformative belonging. Her first book, Capoeira Connections: A Memoir in Motion (UPF 2023), is a multi-sited ethnography that interweaves the local and global histories and flows of this Afro-Brazilian combat game with her own thirty-year trajectory as a practitioner, researcher and instructor. For more on her scholarship, teaching and media, and a link to the open access edition of her book, visit www.katyawesolowski.com. Mestre Calanga (Luis Carlos Galvez) has been practicing capoeira since 1980. Born in Brazil, he has lived in Lowell for more than 20 years, where he leads the group Capoeira Rosa Rubra. His philosophy is to teach capoeira as a cultural practice and a therapy tool to help his students understand both themselves and the world around them. Read her Faculty bio. on the Duke website.

A Colloquium on the 50th Anniversary of the Carnation Revolution of April 25, 1974, including the screening of the feature film April’s Captains

Presented by the Saab for Portuguese Studies, in partnership with the UMass Lowell Department of World Languages and Cultures. Sponsored in part by the Consulate-General of Portugal in Boston and Camões, I.P.

Thursday, April 25, 2024.
In-person at Coburn Hall 110 and via Zoom
Free and open to the public.

Special Guest: Maria de Medeiros, actress and director of April’s Captains (Capitães de Abril, 2000) The colloquium will examine the significance of the democratic transitions in Portugal and Spain, following the authoritarian regimes of António de Oliveira Salazar and Francisco Franco. Distinguished scholars from Portugal, Spain, and the United States will explore the enduring impact of this historic period. The program will conclude with the screening of Maria de Medeiros's April’s Captains at 6:45 p.m.

Presenters, in the following order, beginning at 2:30 p.m.:

• Maria de Medeiros, actress and director of April’s Captains
• António Costa Pinto, ICS-University of Lisbon
• Paul Manuel, Georgetown University
• Daniel Arroyo-Rodríguez, UMass Lowell
• Bernardo Pinto da Cruz, FLAD/Saab Visiting Professor, UMass Lowell and researcher at IPRI-Nova.

Schedule

• Colloquium presentations: 2:30-5:45 p.m.
• Complimentary light dinner: 5:45 p.m.
• Screening of April’s Captains (2000, subtitles): 6:45 p.m.

For additional information, write to Bernardo Pinto da Cruz, by email at: bernardo_pintodacruz@uml.edu.

A Conversation with Luso-American Author Katherine Vaz

Presented by the Saab for Portuguese Studies, in partnership with the UMass Lowell Department of World Languages and Cultures.

Wednesday, April 3, 2024 via Zoom.
Free and open to the public.

This lecture will discuss what inspires fiction or writing in general, and how the process unfolds. How do images work in stories, and how can we achieve great emotional impact with surprising plots? What are the secrets to making stories come alive? It will focus on the particulars of "Our Lady of the Artichokes" as the lead story in a collection, and its current adaptation process into a screenplay. "Revenge in the Name of All Owls" grew out of one singular, strong feeling: How do we convey to others what that might be without stating it outright? Finally, what does it mean to write out of our Luso/a backgrounds?

Katherine Vaz is a former Briggs-Copeland Fellow in Fiction at Harvard University, a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the author of the novel Above the Salt (Flatiron Books/Macmillan, 2023), a People Magazine Book of the Week, a Top 15 Pick of Good Morning, America, and a Top November pick on Goodreads. Her previous novel Mariana has been selected by the Library of Congress as one of the Top Thirty International Books of 1998). Her collection Fado & Other Stories won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and Our Lady of the Artichokes received the Prairie Schooner Book Award. She is the first Portuguese American to have her work recorded for the Archives of the Library of Congress (Hispanic Division).

For additional information, write to Frank F. Sousa, director of the Saab Center, by email at: frank_sousa@uml.edu.

A Conversation with Ambassadors Francisco Duarte Lopes and Robert A. Sherman

Presented by the Saab for Portuguese Studies, the Political Science Department and the Consulate General of Portugal in Boston.

Friday, January 26 at noon, Coburn Hall, Room 255
Free and open to the public.

Francisco Duarte Lopes is the Portuguese Ambassador to the United States, having formerly served in the equivalent position at the United Nations. Among the many other leadership positions held were Director-General of Foreign Policy, Director-General for European Affairs, and Diplomatic Advisor to the Prime-Minister.

Robert A. Sherman served as the U.S. ambassador to Portugal from 2014 to 2017, focusing on bilateral economic development and international security issues. From 1991 to 1993, he was the assistant attorney general of Massachusetts and chief of the state’s Consumer Protection Division. Sherman is a founding member of Greenberg Traurig’s Boston office. He teaches International Relations in our Political Science Department.

For additional information, write to Frank F. Sousa, director of the Saab Center, by email at: frank_sousa@uml.edu.

UMass Lowell, Saab Center for Portuguese Studies Spring Colloquium, 2023

Saturday June 3, 2023 10 a.m. - 1:30 p.m.

Coburn Hall Ballroom, 850 Broadway St., Lowell, MA

Parking in the Wilder Lot behind Coburn Hall.

Presenters and Topics:

• Welcome and Overview by Frank Sousa, Director, Saab Center for Portuguese Studies, UMass Lowell
• Keynote: The Portuguese Diaspora in Context: Labor, Capital, and Immigration in New England, Toronto, and Hawaii by Cristiana Bastos, Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon
• Ethnic Resilience in a Gentrified Place: Rethinking the Portuguese-Azorean American Landscape in Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts by Graça Índias Cordeiro, Department of Social Research Methods, University Institute of Lisbon and Giuseppe Formato, World Language Department, Somerville High School
• The Portuguese in Lowell and Immigrant Neighborhood Formation by Gray Fitzsimons, Saab Center for Portuguese Studies, UMass Lowell

• Architecture, Art, and Culture in Back Central, Lowell’s Premier Portuguese Neighborhood by Marie Frank, Department of Art and Design, UMass Lowell
• Listen and Learn, Show and Tell, Voices and Pictures from Lowell’s Portuguese-American Community by Pedro Letria, Escola Superior de Arte e Design, Caldas da Rainha, Lisboa and Cláudia Lobo, Journalist, Lisbon, Portugal
• Exploring the Portuguese Experience in a Community Archives: UMass Lowell’s Portuguese American Digital Archive by Nicole Tantum, UMass Lowell Libraries
• Geographic and Historical Information Online: A Prototype for Mapping Portuguese Back Central by Richard P. Howe, Jr., Northern Middlesex Registry of Deeds  

For questions or to learn more please contact us.

To learn more please follow these links below.

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• Lecture Series
• Performance Series
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