Leonor Simas-Almeida
Senior Lecturer in Portuguese & Brazilian Studies:
Portuguese & Brazilian Studies
Phone: +1 401 863 3042
Phone 2: +1 401 861 4691
Leonor_Goncalves_Simas-Almeida@brown.edu
Dr. Simas-Almeida's teaching and research cover different periods and different genres of Portuguese literature. However, her work is more particularly centered on narrative fiction and, lately, it has been reflecting a strong interest in a poetics of reading rooted in affect (although not excluding other compatible approaches), which inform all of her most recently published papers. Having started by applying her focus on "intelligent emotions" to 19th century narrative and to comparative literature (her primary field of scholarship), she has extended her theoretical framework both to 20th century Portuguese fiction and to African lusophone literature.
Biography
Dr. Leonor Simas-Almeida was born in Lisbon, Portugal, where in 1975 she received a B. A. in Portuguese Literature and in 1979 a "Licenciatura" in Romance Philology. For fourteen years she taught in Portugal. In 1989 she was sent by ICALP (currently "Instituto Camões") to Brown University to teach Portuguese language and culture. At Brown, she received an M.A (1999) and a PhD (2004) in Comparative Literature. From 1989 to the present, she has been teaching courses in Portuguese language, culture and literature and, more recently, in Lusophone African Literature at the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies. Dr. Simas-Almeida's teaching and research cover different periods and different genres of Portuguese literature. However, her work is more particularly centered on narrative fiction and, lately, it has been reflecting a strong interest in the cognitive role of emotions in literary analysis. Having started by applying her focus on "intelligent emotions" to 19th century narrative and to comparative literature (her primary field of scholarship), she has extended her theoretical approach both to 20th century Portuguese fiction and to African lusophone literature. Literary translation is another area of special interest for Dr. Simas-Almeida who has published translations of essays and short stories from English into French and, for the most part, from English into Portuguese.
Interests
Dr. Simas-Almeida is currently preparing for publication a comparative study of three 19th century novels (Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Kate Chopin's The Awakening, and Eça de Queirós' O Primo Bazílio) focused on the literary representation of emotions and the cognitive-affective response they are bound to elicit. She is also writing and publishing essays on contemporary Portuguese and lusophone African literature, also framed by the theoretical approach summarily described above. Some of her most recent papers (all forthcoming) may illustrate a hermeneutic reading that pays particular attention to an alleged nexus between emotions and literature: "The narrator's mediation and the readers's affective response in José Saramago's Levantado do Chão"; "Teias emocionais em torno de identidades perdidas n' A Costa dos Murmúrios"; and "Germano Almeida y el filtro de los afectos en la transfiguración de lo real en A Ilha Fantástica."
Awards
2004, Elected to Phi Beta Kappa
Affiliations
American Association of Teacher of Spanish and Portuguese
American Portuguese Studies Association
Associação Internacional de Lusitanistas
Teaching
Dr. Simas-Almeida teaches a wide range of Portuguese literature courses with emphasis on the19th and 20th century novel. She also teaches contemporary literature of Portuguese-speaking Africa.
Funded Research
N/A
Curriculum Vitae
Download Leonor Simas-Almeida's Curriculum Vitae in PDF Format
