Biography

My research interests focus on the interdependencies between language, migration/race, and the nation in literary texts and everyday discourses. I am currently finishing a FCT post-doc project on the culturalistic representations of the South and the Mediterranean space in the German context. I have published on the racialised stereotypes of the South during the Euro Crisis 2015, and on the term "Südländer" [Southerner] in German police reports as a discriminatory category and a culturalistic form of racial profiling. My methods combine interdisciplinary approaches from the German Sozialgeschichte der Literatur, Critical Theory (including its focus on the critical potential of art), Discourse Analysis, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Studies. My publications also include literary topics such as on comic as an aesthetical expression of shock and différance, mainly in the work of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, and on "migration literature" in German, specially by Yoko Tawada and Emine Segvi Özdamar, but also on the life, work and memory of the Black German author and pioneer of German (Black) feminism May Ayim. I was educated in Portugal, Germany and the UK. I studied Modern German and English Languages and Literatures at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, and at the Universität Regensburg, Germany. I obtained my PhD in German Studies (Neuere Deutsche Literaturwissenschaft) at Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel, Germany (in a European cotutelle de thèse with the University of Coimbra). I gained international teaching and research experience as a lecturer ("Assistente"), senior lecturer ("Professora Auxiliar") at the University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Portugal, and universities of Sheffield and Manchester, UK and at the Gender Research Group of the University of Kiel, Germany. I am currently a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra, a review editor (section: Postcolonial Studies) for the journal IASLonline (University of Munich), and a member of the research project Holocaust in Portuguese. A dynamic repository of educational resources.