Ana Vera

Ana Vera

Guest researcher, Guest Researcher

Member of:

    I am a researcher in Portuguese, Lusophone and Iberian studies, working with both Film and Languages & Cultures. I have a French academic formation and training and my research largely focuses on Portuguese and Spanish cinema, where I have particular interest in how film connects to societal, political, and cultural contexts.

    My work in the field produced the single-authored book Le Cinéma Portugais: Histoire, Culture et Societé 1963-2015 (L’Harmattan, 2019) a major study of 50 years of cinema that highlighted the association of film narratives with the evolution of Portuguese society.

    Alongside the close analysis of films (case studies in each period), I also examined the discursive system in film magazines with an interest in film critics and published interviews with filmmakers (archives in Portugal), and cultural practices surrounding the film industry (legislation supporting and sustaining it). Book presentation in Pleibéricos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI4fueKzdxw&feature=emb_title

    More recently, I have been further pursuing the questioning of how films relate to social realities, by studying Portuguese and Spanish cinemas in the context of a series of multifaceted crises. I am examining the conditions of film production, exhibition, and criticism that frame the making of films in the context of polycrisis, as well as analysing the narratives, style, and aesthetics of a selected corpus of Iberian films (PI of a research project proposal under assessment, and several conference papers on the subject).

    For this reason, I am also developing research within the field of Iberian Studies. My intervention in the field is twofold. On the one hand, my research explores cinema as a source of knowledge, that is, as another possible site for the production of meaning and public understanding of the social challenges in the Iberian Peninsula. On the other hand, I examine the complex reasons behind the theoretical and practical difficulties of implementing Iberian Studies (notably in Danish academia), and the opportunities for renewal the field could offer (e.g co-author of the chapter “Implementing Iberian Studies in Denmark: challenges and opportunities”, Global Perspectives on Iberian Studies, forthcoming).  

    I have also led the Danish team of the international project “ECOS – Exiles, to counter silence: memories, objects, and narratives of uncertain times” funded by the European Commission (Sept. 2019 – April 2022): #ECOS Home - #ECOS exílios, contrariar o silêncio (ecosexilios-cria.org). The project was based on collaborative work between academics, artists, and civil society individuals in Portugal, France and in Denmark. ECOS promoted a public debate on how exile narratives affect the construction of a transnational memory through several pedagogic activities, such as: the production of an “ECOS pedagogical package”, the organisation of exhibitions and public events, a book collecting the memories of Portuguese exiles in Denmark (Tak Susie, 2021), and the realisation of a documentary film on Portuguese exiles in Denmark (released in May 2022). 

    Teaching

    Post-Graduate level:

    • Analysis and Communication of Current Events in the Portuguese-Speaking World (2017-2022)
    • Cinema and identity (Spring 2017)
    • Supervisor of one M.A. dissertation (2019/2020): “Desire in the films of Manoel de Oliveira and João César Monteiro”.

    Undergraduate level:

    • Introduction to Lusophone Language and Culture 
    • Introduction to the Portuguese-Speaking World 
    • Introduction to Area-Studies
    • Debates and Voices in Portuguese Society 
    • Film, Media and Arts in Portuguese in a Globalized World
    • Discourse and Identity 
    • Portuguese Language in Time and Space
    • Problem-Based Team Project
    • Voices in Luso-Brazilian Literature and Culture 
    • Professional Communication in Portuguese 
    • Area Studies Seminar on Language, Discourse, and Society 

    DEPARTMENTAL LECTURES/MODULES:

    • “Transnational Perspectives in European film from 1945 to the present”
    • Culture 2: Cinema and Nation
    • Culture 3: Migrant and diasporic cinema in contemporary Europe

    EXTERNAL TEACHING:

    • University of Vienna: Erasmus staff exchange program, 2 three-hour lectures on “Portuguese Cinema and Society” for the students in Portuguese culture and language, December 2018.
    • University of Graz: two-hour lecture about the “Narratives of crisis in Portuguese Cinema”, December 2018 (invited).

    ADMINISTRATIVE RESPONSABILITIES

    • International Coordinator for Portuguese and Brazilian Studies (2017- present).

    ID: 173271504