The Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Luso-American Development Fund, and Camões - Instituto da Cooperação e da Língua, have established the Três Marias Research Chair in Portuguese and Luso-Afro-Brazilian Cultures at Rutgers University – New Brunswick. The first of its kind on our campus, Três Marias supports research at all academic levels, and facilitates transnational and interdisciplinary study and dialogues on Portuguese and Lusophone cultures through symposia, conferences, programming initiatives, research fellowships, and scholarship grants.
Mission
Três Marias Research Chair in Portuguese and Luso-Afro-Brazilian Cultures supports queer, feminist, and intersectional research and critiques of Lusophone cultures and societies. Our programming initiatives work collaboratively with institutions at Rutgers and abroad to engage with Portuguese-speaking cultures across interdisciplinary and transnational fields of study. Portuguese is a language of European, Latin American, Asian, and African history; of colonizers, empires, and the transatlantic slave trade dominated by Portugal and Brazil. It is also the language of resistance and revolution, and of diverse and dispersed lusophone diasporas throughout the globe. Três Marias amplifies these histories, cultures, peoples, and their interventions in our contemporary historical moment.
About the Três Marias Research Chair
The namesakes of the Três Marias Research Chair, (the three Marias), are Portuguese writers Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta, and Maria Velho da Costa. Together, they wrote Novas Cartas Portuguesas (1972), published in English as The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters (1975), a collaborative feminist work of various literary genres conceptualized as anonymous letters to one another that were critical of the long-enduring Portuguese colonial state and conservative, patriarchal society. Upon its release, Novas Cartas Portuguesas was banned and the three Marias were prosecuted by the Portuguese Estado Novo regime for immoral and pornographic works. Their censorship and trial sparked an international feminist movement with rallies in Paris and New York. Their trial only came to an end, however, after the Portuguese Revolution of April 25, 1974, which toppled the fascist regime and brought an end to Portuguese colonialism in Africa. The Three Marias and their work are recognized as a foundational publication of feminist literature in Portugal, as a literature of protest under a time of great political oppression, and as a pivotal turning point for social and cultural critique of Portuguese literature, history, and society.