UMass Lowell to offer Portuguese language courses in spring 2015

The Portuguese Program in the Department of Cultural Studies at UMass Lowell will offer three language courses in the Spring Semester 2015, two in first-year and one in intermediate Portuguese.

The new program will be launched in Spring Semester 2015 with historian Ana Valdez, postdoctoral fellow at Yale University and researcher at the Centre for History at the University of Lisbon. Prof. Valdez will teach a Topics in History course in the UMass Lowell History Department, titled “The First Globalization: The Portuguese and the Age of Discovery”. This course offers an introduction to the history of the Portuguese world since the foundation of the Kingdom of Portugal in 1143, with particular focus on the first European imperial cycle of the modern era, a period often called the “Age of Discovery.”

The lectures, readings, and discussions in this course will illustrate Portugal’s history and its role in the world’s first movement of globalization: the expansion from the Iberian Peninsula into Africa, the Americas and Asia, including the arrival of the first Europeans in Japan in 1543.

The new program is possible thanks to sponsors FLAD (Luso-American Development Foundation) and Saab-Pedroso Center for Portuguese and Cultural Studies.

Founded in 2013, with generous gifts from the Saab Family Fund and Luís Pedroso, the Saab-Pedroso Center for Portuguese Culture & Research promotes the multidisciplinary study of the language, literatures and cultures of the vast and varied Portuguese speaking world comprised of over 230 million people in eight countries on four continents and its diaspora.