Margarida Rendeiro and Nuno Grancho are the next Visiting Professors at Brown University

Margarida Rendeiro and Nuno Grancho are the next Visiting Professors at the University of Brown in the academic year 2026/27, and will teach subjects on contemporary Portugal for a semester, in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies.

The Visiting Professor competition at Brown University is the result of a partnership between FLAD and Brown University, under which every year two Portuguese professors or those residing in Portugal are selected to teach a semester at Brown University, within the areas of History or Social Sciences (e.g. Sociology, Anthropology or Political Sciences), addressing contemporary Portugal, and the theme may be extended to Portuguese-speaking societies and/or have an international comparative dimension.

Researchers Margarida Rendeiro and Nuno Grancho were chosen by the jury to teach a chair in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University, considered one of the best institutions of higher education in the United States. The choice of the two candidates took into account the quality of the curricula, the experience of teaching in English and the relevance of the syllabus of the subjects proposed by the selected candidates.

The jury was composed of António Costa Pinto, Coordinating Researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Onésimo Teotónio Almeida, Full Professor and Researcher at Brown University, João Cardoso Rosas, Full Professor at the University of Minho, Cristiana Bastos, Anthropologist and Researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Patrícia Ferreira, Director of Graduate Studies and Assistant Professor at Brown University, and Michael Baum, FLAD administrator, who chaired the jury.

Margarida Rendeiro is an Assistant Researcher with permanent appointment at the Centre for the Humanities (CHAM), NOVA FCSH, in Lisbon, where she coordinates the Research Group on Transcultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies. With a PhD in Portuguese Studies from King’s College London, she is dedicated to research on Afro-Luso-Brazilian literary and cultural production, cultural resistance and gender studies. She is co-organizer of Writing of Women as Cultural Resistance (V&R-Brill, forthcoming) and Challenging Memories and Rebuilding Identities (Routledge, 2019). She was Principal Investigator of the project Women’s Literature: Memories, Peripheries, and Resistances in the Luso-Afro-Brazilian Atlantic and participates in projects on women in literature and visual arts and on the contemporary historical novel in Portuguese.

In the Autumn Semester of 2026, Margarida Rendeiro will teach the subject “Intertwined Memories: Heritage, Sustainability and Communities in Portugal and Lusophone Africa”. The course addresses the relationship between memory, heritage and sustainable communities in Portugal and in Portuguese-speaking African countries, as well as in their diasporas. Based on case studies and a comparative approach, it analyzes cultural narratives, artistic production, and community practices in the light of memory studies, postcolonial theory, decolonial feminism, and sustainability. The program integrates literature, visual arts, music, film, oral history, and digital media, promoting the development of critical tools to understand processes of memory, identity, and sociocultural transformation.

Nuno Grancho is an architect, an integrated researcher at DINÂMIA’CET, Iscte – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, and a professor whose work examines how spatial practices of power and resistance, through architecture and cities, shape modernity and coloniality in South Asia. Her research focuses on human and material agency in the epistemology and geopolitics of architecture and urbanism, with particular attention to the relationships between the public and private domains in spatial configurations. Between 2021 and 2024 he was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the Centre for Privacy Studies at the University of Copenhagen, with the Privacy on the move project, and a professor at the Royal Danish Academy. In 2024 he was a Visiting Researcher at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. He is currently an Affiliated Scholar at the University of Copenhagen and the Royal Danish Academy, and an Affiliated Member of the Indian Ocean World Centre at McGill University.

During the Spring Semester of 2027, Nuno Grancho will teach the curricular unit “Contact Spaces: Architecture, Colonialism and Decolonization in the Portuguese-speaking World”. The course aims to analyze the history of architecture and urbanism in the Portuguese-speaking universe through postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, examining how Portuguese colonialism shaped spatial practices, discourses and historiographies between the end of the Enlightenment and the 1960s. Based on case studies and a comparative approach, it addresses topics such as colonial urbanism, Brazilian modernisms, Afro-Lusophone cities and post-independence spatial transformations, contributing to a critical and decentered reading of the global histories of architecture and the city.

Congratulations and good work!