Bernardo Pinto da Cruz is the next FLAD/Saab Visiting Professor in Portuguese Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. The program aims to promote the Portuguese studies program at this North American university and develop the university’s relationship with the Portuguese-American community in the region.

FLAD/Saab Visiting Professor in Portuguese Studies is a partnership between the Luso-American Development Foundation and the Saab Center for Portuguese Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell College of Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. This collaboration provides support for a three-year visiting professor of Portuguese studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Bernardo Pinto da Cruz is Visiting Assistant Professor at Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa (NOVA FCSH) and a researcher at Instituto Português de Relações Internacionais (IPRI-NOVA). In 2022, he completed his doctoral thesis on the forced concentration of populations and the moderation of violence during the Colonial War in Angola (1961-1974). He is also the author and editor of articles on the link between penal reforms, rural development, and public policy changes in a colonial context. He currently leads the JUSELTRA project of Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) which focuses on the study of the socioeconomic effects of Portuguese colonialism in Africa.

As Visiting Professor at Umass Lowell in the Spring Semester 2024, Bernardo Pinto da Cruz will be teaching The Transition to Democracy in Portugal in a European and Global Context at the University’s Department of Political Science, and also the seminar Portuguese Counterinsurgency in Africa: A Comparative Perspective. Both will be part of the minor in Portuguese Studies and the main curriculum of the course in Arts & Humanities.

For the first edition of this program, FLAD selected Cristiana Bastos, an anthropologist and senior researcher at ICS. During the Spring Semester of 2023, the professor taught the Epidemics in History course at the university’s History Department, and also the seminar Connected Histories: Portuguese Diasporas in a Comparative Perspective.