Duncan Simpson will be the next FLAD/Saab Visiting Professor in Portuguese Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. The initiative 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.

The FLAD/Saab Visiting Professor in Portuguese Studies is a partnership between the Luso-American Development Foundation, the Saab Family, and the University of Massachusetts Lowell College of Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. The objective of the program is to contribute to the curriculum of this Faculty by reinforcing the Portuguese academic perspective and, more specifically, to support the Portuguese Studies Program at UMass Lowell, and the mission of the Saab Center for Portuguese Studies. The Visiting Professor will teach up to two courses in English and deliver one or more public lectures in their area of expertise. The program provides for a competitive one-semester salary stipend.

Duncan Simpson holds a PhD from King’s College London. Between 2019 and 2021 she was a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon (ICS-UL). His research interests include political Catholicism, Salazar’s political police, and clientelism in the Estado Novo. He has taught contemporary history courses in Portugal, France, and the USA. He is currently a Research Fellow at ICS-UL.

The selected Visiting Professor will teach two subjects: ‘Salazar’s Dictatorship in Comparative Historical Perspective: From the Fascist Era to Decolonization (1933-1974)’ and ‘Themes in the History of Portugal from its Foundation to the Present’.

In the last editions of this Program, FLAD selected Cristiana Bastos, anthropologist and Principal Investigator at ICS, Bernardo Pinto da Cruz, Invited Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of the New University of Lisbon (NOVA FCSH) and Researcher at the Portuguese Institute of International Relations (IPRI-NOVA), and Inês Thomas Almeida, musicologist, PhD in Historical Musical Sciences from the New University of Lisbon, where she is an invited assistant professor, is a researcher at IELT and INET-md.