Professor Dr. Cristiana Bastos will be the first FLAD/Saab Visiting Professor in Portuguese Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she will teach the “Epidemics in History” chair in the History Department of this university in the spring semester of 2023.

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.

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.

Professor Dr. Cristiana Bastos is an anthropologist and Principal Investigator of the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, since 1990. Her work intersects the disciplines of anthropology, history and social studies of science, technology and medicine.

She is a researcher in the framework of the Institute of Social Sciences, where she coordinates the Research Group Identities, Cultures, Vulnerabilities. She teaches and taught regularly at the Universities of Lisbon, Coimbra, ISCTE, Brown, University of Massachusetts, UNICAMP, UERJ, and gave seminars at the Museu Nacional-UFRJ, FIOCRUZ, UFSC, UnB, Yale, Chicago, Oxford, JNU, U Eduardo Mondlane.

As a visiting professor at Umass Lowell, Cristiana Bastos will teach the “Epidemics in History” chair at the University’s History Department, as well as the seminar “Connected Histories: Portuguese Diasporas in a Comparative Perspective” at Honors College. Both will be part of the minor in Portuguese Studies and the main curriculum of the course in Arts & Humanities.

Cristiana Bastos will take with her extensive experience as a Professor and Researcher, having developed work on regions as distinct as the interior of the Algarve, Brazil, United States, contemporary Lisbon, colonial Goa and Lusophone Africa, having taught at the University of Lisbon, University of Coimbra, University of Brown, University of Massachusetts, and also participated as a visiting professor at several universities in an international context, from Yale, Chicago to Oxford. She is currently the Principal Researcher in the “The Colour of Labour” project, where she is directly involved in the work developed in relation to Guyana, Hawaii, New England and Angola.