Literature and the Global Contemporary (LaGC) is a research group that comprises researchers working in various areas of Literary Studies. Coming from different backgrounds and research experiences, its members include seasoned researchers with well-established research careers, as well as promising young researchers. Their individual work focuses on a wide range of interests and projects, including literature, comparative literature, literary theory and criticism, and literary translation.
The group’s diversity extends to its members’ intellectual traditions, which comprehend various national literatures, as well as literary history, theory and criticism, comparative literature, translation and culture studies. This diversity constitutes a most promising feature, as this heterogeneity is founded on a common goal that is best summed up in Sontag’s idea of what literature does: ‘It [literature] connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts’.
As a group, its members are invested in developing a collective agenda that combines their interests around a literary problem. This takes the shape of regular meetings in which issues, methods and topics are discussed, thus producing a common reflexive fabric that provides structure and identity to individual and group projects.
The group’s major contribution to the I&D Unit translates into 3 different areas:
- The reinforcement of the theoretical and conceptual framework of CECC as a center registered in the field of Literary Studies;
- An in-depth discussion of the nature and functions of the literary in the global present, articulating it with literature’s century-long legacy and the role it can play in the future metamorphoses of Western culture;
- A reflection on the reciprocal shaping of the literary and culture and technology.
The research team:
Researchers
Alexandra Lopes
Ana Matoso
Joana Moura
Jorge Fazenda Lourenço
Jorge Vaz de Carvalho
Maria Gabriela Fragoso
Maria Sequeira Mendes
Miguel Pedro Quadrio
Nuno Amado
Serena Cacchioli
Teresa Jorge Ferreira
Collaborating researchers
Joana Meirim
José Maria Vieira Mendes
Maria Filomena Barradas
Patrícia Anzini
Rebeca Leite Fuks
PhD students
Ana Catarina Brasil
Ana Salgueiro
Emily Duffy
Hugo Simões
João Oliveira
Madalena Quintela
María Falcón
Mariana Gonçalves
Nonna Pinto
Reuben Ross
Yang Yang
