2020 News & Events

How Fresh Cultural Perspectives Are Attracting New Audiences to Short Fiction

The Saab Center for Portuguese Studies’ Distinguished Writers Series, in partnership with the Department of World Languages and Cultures and the Jack and Stella Kerouac Center for the Public Humanities, presents a webinar with: Prize-winning novelist and short-story author Katherine Vaz!

Monday, December 7, 2020 at 4 p.m. via Zoom

After registering you will be emailed directions on how to access the webinar.

Vaz will share insights on the art of short prose—including her one biggest secret for how to make stories work. Using one of her pieces, “My Hunt for King Sebastian”, as a springboard, she will discuss how she tapped her Portuguese-American background and how fresh cultural perspectives are attracting new audiences to short fiction.

This webinar is incorporated into Prof. Diana Gomes Simões’ course The Short Story in the Lusophone World, where students will discuss Vaz’s “My Hunt for King Sebastian,” from the collection Fado & Other Stories (1997).

About Katherine Vaz

Katherine Vaz is the author of two critically-acclaimed novels, Saudade (a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection) and Mariana, published in six languages and picked by the Library of Congress as one of the Top 30 International Books of 1998. Her collection Fado & Other Stories won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and Our Lady of Artichokes and Other Portuguese-American Stories the Prairie Schooner Award. Her latest book is The Love Life an Assistant Animator & Other Stories. The short story “Revenge in the Name of all Owls” is referenced in The Best American Short Stories 2020. Vaz has been a Briggs-Copeland Fellow in Fiction at Harvard and Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

More Information

For more information, please contact Natália Melo by email: Natalia_Melo@uml.edu or phone: 978-934-5199.

The Saab Center for Portuguese Studies’ Distinguished Writers Series, in collaboration with the Jack and Stella Kerouac Center for the Public Humanities and the Department of English and World Languages and Cultures, presents a webinar:

Readings and Conversations with Mozambican author Mia Couto

Monday, November 2, 2020 at 4 p.m., on Zoom
Moderated by Prof. Diana Gomes Simões

About Mia Couto

Mia Couto, born in Beira, Mozambique in 1955, is one of the leading Lusophone writers today. He is the bestselling author of eleven novels, many collections of short stories, three collections of poetry, and five children’s books. He was awarded the Camões Prize for Literature in 2013 and the Neustadt International Literature Prize in 2014, and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize in 2015 and shortlisted for International Dublin Literary Prize in 2017. His latest publication in the US is a short story in The Decameron Project just published by the New York Times. He has also worked as a journalist and is a professor of Biology at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo. This webinar is incorporated into Prof. Diana Gomes Simões’ course The Short Story in the Lusophone World, where students will read and discuss Couto’s “The Bird Dreaming Baobab” (see attachment) from the collection Every Man is a Race (1989).

More Information

For more information, please contact Natália Melo by email: Natalia_Melo@uml.edu or phone: 978-934-5199.

Thursday, October 15, 4 p.m.

The Saab Center for Portuguese Studies presents:
A Virtual Lecture / Book Talk with James McGlinchey, author of The Final Report: A History of the Portuguese-American Citizenship Project, 1999-2016

Please register online using the link below and you will receive access via email.

The Portuguese American Citizenship Project was established in 1999 with support from the Luso-American Foundation to encourage Portuguese-Americans to participate more fully in civic affairs and gain a stronger voice in governance. The Final Report: A History of the Portuguese American Citizenship Project, 1999-2016 is a study in civic engagement that documents the Project’s non-partisan, data-driven programs to promote U.S. citizenship, voter registration, and voting. From 1999 to 2009, James McGlinchey served as the coordinator of the Project, working with churches, clubs and social welfare organizations on grass-roots civic campaigns in communities ranging from post-industrial cities in New England to farming communities in California.

About The Author

James Martin McGlinchey was a Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. Department of State 1975-1999. His last overseas posting was as the Counselor for Economic Affairs at the U.S. Embassy, Lisbon. Mr. McGlinchey holds an MA in Economics from the University of Kansas a second MA in Public Administration from Harvard University. He was born in Fall River, MA, and traces his Portuguese roots back to his maternal grandparents who immigrated to the United States from the Azores Islands at the turn of the 20th century.

Rui Tavares

The UMass Lowell Saab Center for Portuguese Studies and History Department present a virtual lecture.

• When: April 29, 2020 at 11 a.m.
• Where: Virtual
• Who: Rui Tavares, Gulbenkian / Saab Visiting Professor in Portuguese Studies in Spring 2020

Today, millions of young Europeans enroll in an academic exchange program called the Erasmus Program, named after the humanist Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam. Back in the 1500s, the Erasmus “program” consisted of finding out where Erasmus himself was staying in Europe, and dropping by to visit or even stay at his home in Basel, Leuven or Antwerp. Thomas More visited Erasmus in Antwerp, and it was there that he met a young Portuguese sailor who inspired him to write Utopia. Years later, a young Portuguese humanist, diplomat and businessman went to visit Erasmus. In this lecture we will follow the trajectory of Damião de Góis, from the year of the death of Thomas More in 1535 to his imprisonment by the Portuguese Inquisition in the 1570s, in order to understand how an intellectual world ended by the middle of the 16th century but, nonetheless, bequeath to us a certain idea of Europe and even globalization.

ABOUT RUI TAVARES

Rui Tavares is a Portuguese writer and historian and the Spring 2020 Gulbenkian/Saab Visiting Professor in Portuguese Studies at UMass Lowell. He studied Art History at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Social Sciences at the Universidade de Lisboa, and earned a PhD in History and Civilizations from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales de Paris. He has been visiting distinguished lecturer at Brown University and NYU. Among his seven books is The Enlightened Censor, published in 2018, on censorship in the Portuguese Enlightenment regime of the Marquis de Pombal. He has also translated, into Portuguese, Giordano Bruno’s On Magic and Voltaire’s Candide. He was Member of the European Parliament (2009-2014). Among his publications/reports on European Union affairs is The Irony of the European Project (2012). He is founder of the Portuguese political party Livre, a major cultural critic in Portugal and a columnist at the leading daily newspaper Público.

MORE INFORMATION

For more information, contact Natalia Melo of the Saab Center for Portuguese Studies by email: Natalia_Melo@uml.edu.

Thursday, March 5, 2020 at  7 p.m.
Richard and Nancy Donahue Family Academic Arts Center
240 Central St., Lowell, MA 01854
Parking at: Early Garage, 135 Middlesex Street

The Saab Center for Portuguese Studies and Middlesex Community College, in partnership with the UMass Lowell departments of Music and World Languages and Cultures and the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program, present a concert: “All over the Map” With Blue Thread.

“All over the Map” showcases global ballads migrating through centuries and cultures featuring medieval Galician-Portuguese Love Songs, Renaissance Villancicos, and Folk Ballads from Portugal, Greece, Scandinavia and the US.

Blue Thread is:

• Yaniv Yacoby, strings
• Cristi Catt, soprano
• Nikola Radan, flutes
  • With special guests:
    • Shira Kammen, vielle, and Hui Weng, guzheng

“Blue Thread revealed a vibrant and playful music that transported us to the rich and varied musical experience of medieval times without abandoning the present.” (Évora News)

Watch videos of Blue Thread via YouTube:

• Blue Thread - Ondas do mar de Vigo (Waves of the Sea of Vigo)
• Blue Thread - Mandad’Ey Comigo
• Blue Thread - Mia Irmana Fremosa - My Lovely Sister
• Blue Thread - Lonely in Vigo - Ay Deus Se Sab’Ora Meu Amigo

This program is supported in part by a grant from the Lowell Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.

Exhibition Dates: January 20 - February 28, 2020

• Reception: Moloney Hall at University Crossing, Tuesday, February 18, 5:30 p.m.

The Art & Design Department and the Saab Center for Portuguese Studies at UMass Lowell announce a show of selected student artworks from the Spring 2019 study abroad trip to the Azorean Islands. The works are from the Documentary Image course organized by Anna Isaak-Ross and Pavel Romaniko. The course explored Lowell’s Azorean diaspora's origins, heritage, experience and culture. The course served as a springboard for photographic exploration of three islands in archipelago. Readings, discussions, engagement with the community, and technical instruction conveyed the concepts of objectivity and the documentary image, and how to tell other people’s stories. The thirty-one photographs in this exhibition are the result of that exploration.

The exhibition is made possible by generous support from UMass Lowell’s Saab Center of Portuguese Studies, the Saab Endowment for Portuguese Studies, the College of Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Dean’s Office and the Art & Design Department..

Featured Artists:

Hayley Andrade, Cameron Blanchard, Morgan Clarke, Sebastian Diaz, Andrew Fournier, Chelsea Gray, Anna Isaak-Ross, Daniel Junta, Lindsey Napolitano, Julia Renaghan, Chummeng Soun

For more information, contact the Saab Center at 978-934-5199 or email Natalia Melo at: Natalia_Melo@uml.edu.

Free and open to the public.