Patrícia Martinho Ferreira holds a B.A. in Modern Languages and Literatures (2005) and a M.A. in Theory and Narrative Analysis (2009) from University of Coimbra (Portugal), an M.Ed. in Teaching Portuguese as Foreign and Second Language from University of Porto (Portugal), and a Ph.D. in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies (2018) from Brown University. Prior to coming to UMass Amherst, she taught at UMass Lowell and Brown University. She served as the Director of the Camões Lectureship at University of Bucharest (2006-2009) and at Georgetown University (2009-2012), where she taught Portuguese language and Lusophone cultures, and curated academic and cultural events. Her work has been published in Hispania, Transmodernity, and the Journal of Lusophone Studies (formerly ellipsis), among other venues. She has recently co-edited volume 40 (June 2019) of Cadernos de Literatura Comparada for the Institute for Comparative Literature Margarida Losa, entitled “Transatlantic Voices: The Literary Atlantic in Perspective”. Her current book project, tentatively entitled Orphans of the Empire: Losses and Legacies in Contemporary Portuguese Literature seeks to analyze the literary trope of the orphan in contemporary fiction that constitutes a critical revisiting of the end of Portuguese colonialism in Africa and the consequences of the decolonization process as they relate to a renegotiation of cultural identity. The association between the orphan and the end of the colonial empire is pertinent when considering that this figure represents a rupture with notions of being, particularly home, nation, discourse, and writing.