Ponto de Encontro : Portuguese as a World Language

Anna Klobucka holds an M.A. in Iberian Studies from the University of Warsaw (Poland) and a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University (1993). She has taught at the Ohio State University and the University of Georgia, and she is currently Professor of Portuguese at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where she teaches Portuguese and Lusophone African literatures. She is the co-editor of After the Revolution: Twenty Years of Portuguese Literature 1974-1994 (Bucknell UP, 1997) and Embodying Pessoa: Corporeality, Gender, Sexuality (Toronto, 2007), and the author of The Portuguese Nun: Formation of a National Myth (Bucknell, 2000; Portuguese edition 2006), in addition to many articles in scholarly journals. She served as President of the American Portuguese Studies Association (2005-06).

Clémence Jouët-Pastré obtained her B.A. in Portuguese at UNICAMP, Brazil. She holds an M.A. in Applied Linguistics from UNICAMP and an M.A. in Education from UMASS- Amherst. She received her Ph.D. in Translation Studies from Universidade de São Paulo —Brazil, and has taught at Stanford University and Princeton University. Currently, she directs the Portuguese Language Program at Harvard and the Harvard Summer Program in Rio. Her research interests focus on Portuguese linguistics, translation studies, intercultural communication, and multicultural education. She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters and is the co-editor of Giving Voice to a Nascent Community: Exploring Brazilian Immigration to the U.S. through Research and Practice (Cambridge: David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, 2004).

Patricía Isabel Santos Sobral was educated in Brazil and the United States. She holds a M.A. in Comparative Literature, from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana (1991) and a Ph.D. in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies from Brown University (1997), where she currently teaches. Her teaching interests include the intersection of the arts and its applications to second language acquisition, Brazilian literature of the 20th century, contemporary Brazilian film and its pedagogical applications, and comparative literature. Dr. Sobral is the undergraduate concentration advisor in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, member of the Advisory Board of the Writing Fellows Program, and an active member of the Center for Language Studies. She also leads workshops in Brazil several times a year using the ArtsLit approach for second language acquisition.

Maria Luci De Biaji Moreira received her B.A. in Portuguese and English Languages and Literatures at the Universidade Estadual de Maringá, Paraná, Brazil. She holds an M.A. in Linguistics from the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, and Ph.D. coursework in Linguistics and Philology at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. In 1990, she went to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she received her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics and certificate in SLATE (Second Language Acquisition and Teaching Education), under the direction of Bill VanPatten.  She taught at the University of Georgia and University of California, Berkeley. Since 2000, she directs the Portuguese program at the College of Charleston. As a generalist, she teaches Portuguese language, Brazilian culture and civilization, Linguistics, and Second Language Acquisition Theories and Teaching in the MA in Foreign Languages program. As director of summer programs in Brazil, she has traveled extensively to different regions of Brazil, teaching her students Brazilian culture and civilization. She has published several articles on language acquisition and pedagogy and literary studies. Her main contributions were to the Dictionary of Literary Biography and to Hispania, the journal of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP), where she has acted in a leadership position as the editor of the AATSP Portuguese Newsletter for many years.

Amélia P. Hutchinson was born in Portugal where she obtained her first degree in English and German Philology at the Universidade Clássica de Lisboa, and developed her parallel interests for modern languages and Medieval Studies. In 1975, the Instituto de Alta Cultura, Lisbon, later Instituto de Língua e Cultura Portuguesas, appointed her as "Leitora in Portuguese" at the University of Manchester, UK, where she completed her M.Phil. thesis on ‘European Relations of Portuguese Arthurian Literature’. Since then, she has developed parallel careers as a medievalist and as a specialist in Portuguese Language Studies. She was Head of Portuguese Studies at the University of Salford, UK, and Erasmus coordinator for the Department of Modern Languages. She has been living in the USA since 1996. On that year she published Portuguese: An Essential Grammar (Routledge) a manual for speakers of English, which soon became Routledge's best-selling foreign language grammar, with a second revised and augmented edition published in August 2003. She has also published many articles on Medieval Studies before and after finishing her Ph.D. thesis on Portuguese chroniclers and chronicle writing: 'Leonor Teles and the Construction of Female Characters in Fernão Lopes. At present Amélia Hutchinson is a Lecturer  and Supervisor for Portuguese Language at the University of Georgia, Athens, GA. She is a member of several academic associations (MLA, APSA, SSPHS, International Arthurian Association).