Luísa Leal de Faria

Luisa Leal de Faria is full professor at the Faculty of Human Sciences, The Catholic University of Portugal. From 2004 to 2012 she was Vice-Rector of the University and she is currently President of its The Scientific Society. Until 2004 she was a member of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon, where she graduated in 1974, after a five year course of studies in Germanic Philology and a thesis on the English industrial novels of 1840’s and 1850’s. She obtained her PhD at the University of Lisbon in 1987, with a thesis on the works of Thomas Carlyle and a complementary study on the short stories of E. M. Forster. In 2004 she obtained the title of “Agregado” by the University of Lisbon. Her “Lesson” had the title “From The Conflict of the Faculties to the Culture Wars”, and reflected her interest in researching the “idea” of the University. She taught at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon from 1972 to 2004, and she went back to teaching at Católica after 2012. Her undergraduate courses varied from “Theories of Culture” and “Theories of Representation” in the Communication and Cultural Sciences Program, to “Migrations, Interculturality, Human Rights” in the Social Work Program. She also taught “Social Change” in the Social Work Master’s, but her main activities in Postgraduate courses were focused on the Master and PhD in Culture Studies. Although teaching several seminars in subjects like the “Research Colloquium”, her constant activity was in the teaching of “Metaculture”, recently substituted by “Practices, Policies and Contexts of Cultural Analysis”, which she is currently teaching, in the PhD program. Her research interests were mainly addressed, in the beginning of her academic career, to English Literature of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. The turns in literary and cultural analysis made her shift her focus into contemporary Cultural Theory, Postcolonial, and Decolonial Studies, while she maintains a constant interest in the examination of the “idea” of the University and its transformation and adaptation through time and in different spaces.