Guest Lecturers

Ana Luisa Amaral was born in Lisbon, in 1956. Professor at the University of Porto, she holds a Ph.D. on Emily Dickinson and has developed her academic research in Comparative Poetics, Feminist and Queer Studies. She is a senior researcher of the Institute for Comparative Literature Margarida Losa. Co-author (with Ana Gabriela Macedo) of the Dictionary of Feminist Criticism (2005) and responsible for the annotated edition of New Portuguese Letters (2010) and the coordinator of the international project New Portuguese Letters 40 Years Later, financed by FCT, that involves 10 countries and over 60 researchers. She has written over twenty books, including poetry, theatre, and children’s literature, or fiction. She has translated the poetry of Eunice de Souza, John Updike, and Emily Dickinson. Her books are published in several countries, from Brazil to France, Sweden, Italy, Holland, Venezuela, and Colombia. She was awarded several prizes and distinctions, among which the Correntes d’Escritas/Casino da Póvoa prize or the Great Prize of APE (Associação Portuguesa de Escritores). Her most recent books are Como Tu (children’s literature, 2012), Ara (fiction, 2013) and Escuro (poetry, 2014). She is currently working on a book of poems and a book of essays.

 Jérôme David is a Professor at the University of Geneva. His fields of study include the comparative history of literature and social sciences and the global history of literature. He is the author of Balzac, une éthiqude la description (2010), a social history of “novelistic types" in nineteenth-century French literature, and of Spectres de GoetheLes métamorphoses de la "littérature mondiale" (2012), a comparative approach to the aesthetic category in world literature from Goethe to Casanova, to Moretti and Damrosch. His numerous articles have been published in Revue d'histoire des sciences humainesQuaderni storiciParagraphAnnalesHistoire, sciences sociales and L'Année balzacienne. He is currently working on a book about Charles Renouvier's Uchronie. 

Filinto Elísio was born in Praia, Cape Verde, in 1961. Poet and novelist, he has published Do lado de cá da Rosa (poetry), O inferno do riso (poetry), Prato do dia (columns), Das frutas serenadas (poetry), Das Hespérides (photography, poetry, narrative), Cabo Verde: 30 anos de Cultura (essays, coord.), Li cores & ad vinhos (poetry), Outros sais da beira-mar (novel) and Me_xendo no Baú. Vasculhando o U (poetry). He is co-founder and member of the Capeverdean Writers Academy. He keeps a column in “Diário de Notícias da Madeira” (Portugal), “A Nação” (Cape Verde) and “Ponto Final” (Macau) and he is editor at Rosa de Porcelana Publishing House. He worked as adviser of Cape Verde's Prime-Minister and is Vice-President at Multilingual School Foundation, as well as International Expert of Equatorial Guinea Multilingual Schools and President of Pro Praia's General Assembly (NGO). 

Zhang Longxi
Zhang Longxi is Chair Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation at the City University of Hong Kong. He is a member of the Executive Council of the International Comparative Literature Association, an elected foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities and of the Academia Europaea. He has published widely in both English and Chinese, and his English book publications include The Tao and the Logos: Literary Hermeneutics, East and West (Duke, 1992), Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (Stanford, 1998), Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (Cornell, 2005),Unexpected Affinities: Reading across Cultures (Toronto, 2007), and From Comparison to World Literature (SUNY, forthcoming 2014).