Cristina Gil is an Adjunct Professor at the School of Education – Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal (ESE-IPS), co-coordinator of the Portuguese Sign Language Interpretation and Translation Program (TILGP), and co-founder of the Deaf Studies Lab (CECC). She holds a PhD in Culture Studies (Faculty of Human Sciences – Catholic University of Portugal, 2020), with transdisciplinary research in Culture Studies, Utopian Studies, and Deaf Studies, in which she coined the neologism Deaftopia to describe utopian representations and discourses within Deaf communities and Sign Language Peoples worldwide. This work was supported by a full doctoral scholarship from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT, 2016–2020). During her PhD, she was a visiting scholar at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. (USA). Cristina Gil also holds a Diploma of Advanced Studies in Languages, Literatures and Cultures, with a specialization in Cultural Studies (School of Social Sciences and Humanities – NOVA FCSH, 2014), a Master's in Deaf Communities, Education and Signed Languages (Universidad de Barcelona, 2010), and a Bachelor's degree in Portuguese Sign Language Interpretation and Translation (ESE-IPS, 2007), during which she participated in the Erasmus Program at Högskolan Väst, in Trollhättan, Sweden. In 2013, she was accredited by the University of Minho as a certified instructor in Deaf Education and Special Needs Education. Her research interests focus on human diversity, especially at the disciplinary intersections of Deaf Studies, Deaf History, Deaf Cultures, Deaf epistemologies and ontologies, and Signed Language Interpretation and Translation Studies. Her most recent work includes a chapter on Deaftopias in Utopian Possibilities: Models, Theories, Critiques (2023), and another in The Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literature (2022).
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