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Staff Profile

Dr Fernando Beleza Pinto

Lecturer in Portuguese Studies

  • Address: Room 5.02a, Old Library Building
    Newcastle University
    Claremont Road
    Old Library Building
    NE1 7RU
    UK
Background

Introduction

I joined the School of Modern Languages in September 2018. I hold a B.A. in Modern Languages from the University of Coimbra and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Porto. In 2015, I completed a PhD in Luso-Afro-Brazilian Studies and Theory at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Before coming to Newcastle, I worked at the University of New Hampshire (USA). I teach on the cultures, literatures, and cinemas of the Portuguese-speaking world.

Responsibilities

Degree Programme Director for the M.A. in Global Film

SML Decolonial Champion

Research

Research Interests

My research focusses on modern and contemporary literatures and cinemas of the Portuguese-speaking world, with an emphasis on Portuguese-speaking Africa and Portugal. I am particularly interested in: modernism(s); race, gender, and sexuality in Portuguese and Portuguese-speaking African literatures and film; diaspora and transnational imaginaries; Lusophone cultural production and the environmental humanities.

Current Work

I am currently working on a research project on Black Portuguese Modernism, which explores the Black presence in Lisbon in the interwar period in relation to the literary and artistic worlds. In the 1920s, Lisbon was the permanent or temporary home of intellectuals, writers, artists, students, and workers of African descent with links to Portugal's overseas empire. The contribution of this generation to modernism (in literature, theatre, and the visual arts), as well as the role of the anti-colonial and anti-racist affective communities they established, remains to be fully explored. This project addresses aspects including anti-colonialism, anti-racism, cosmopolitan politics, race, sexuality, and identity. It explores Lisbon's black modernism in transnational, Atlantic, and European contexts. 

My forthcoming book examines Mário Domingues's literary contribution to Black Portuguese Modernism. Mário Domingues (São Tomé and Príncipe, 1899 – Costa da Caparica, 1977) was a writer, journalist, and anarchist, as well as an anti-racist and anti-colonial activist, born on the island of Príncipe to a white Portuguese father and an African mother with Angolan roots. Educated in Lisbon, he played a key role in the early twentieth-century emerging Black movement’s intellectual, political, and artistic life. His literary production offers an anti-colonial and anti-racist critique of modernity, intersecting various modernist debates on themes ranging from race, gender, and sexuality to imperialism, ecology, and vegetarianism. This book traces Domingues’s literary, intellectual, and political trajectory, contributing to a more rigorous understanding of Portuguese modernism and its relationship to the colonial project whilst shedding light on the contours of an original contribution to the modernisms of the Black Atlantic. 

I also collaborate with the Instituto de Literatura Comparada, based at the University of Porto, and with the research project Estranhar Pessoa, based at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa.

Postgraduate Supervision

I welcome research proposals in any of my research interests and closely related areas in comparative literature and film.

Completed MLitt Theses:

Georgina Hulston (Co-supervisor Josep Cru): 'How does Environmental Change, through Land Invasion and Climate Change, affect Indigenous Peoples, Cultures, Knowledge Systems and Languages? A Case Study in The Alto Rio Negro Region of The Northwest Brazilian Amazon.' Awarded 2023.

Emily Armitage (co-supervisor Pauline Henry-Tierney): 'Translating the Taboo: Exploring the translation of transgressive themes in Novas Cartas Portuguesas (1972).' Awarded 2023.

Maria Denton (Co-supervisor Patricia Oliart): 'Indigenous Hip Hop in Brazil: Identity and Resistance.' Awarded 2020.

My current research students:

Matteo Giacche (First supervisor Gitte Hansen): 'Music in Murakami` (PhD).

Tom Mason (First supervisor Sarah Leahy): `Surrealism and the Hollywood Musical 1929-1979: Surrealism Influence, Popular Perception and the Evolution of a Genre' (PhD).

Yueying Wu (First supervisor Gitte Hansen): `Magical Female Bodies in Murakami Haruki, Mo Yan, ad Gabriel Garcia Márquez' (PhD).

Ruby Buttolph (Co-supervisor Hannah Scott): 'Queer Female and Transmasculine Identities in Contemporary Brazilian Music' (MLitt).

Teaching

Undergraduate teaching

Module leader for

POR2001 Cultures and Societies of the Portuguese-Speaking World

POR4003 Identidades Pós-Coloniais Luso-Afro-Brasileiras


Postgraduate teaching

Module leader for

FMS8363: Global Film Cultures and Practices I

FMS8099: Dissertation / Independent Project

Publications