Maria Luisa Coelho

I am a Portuguese Lecturer at Oxford, teaching Portuguese language, literature and art. In addition to Trinity, I am a tutor at Wadham and Lady Margaret Hall. Prior to coming to Oxford, I taught Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Reading. I have a PhD in Comparative Literature and completed a 4-year Postdoctoral project on Portuguese writers and artists living in London (1950-1986), for which I received a FCT grant. I am a Fellow of the HEA, Lusophone Studies editor for the Modern Languages Open journal, and Executive Member of the Association of British and Irish Lusitanists.

At Trinity I teach on Portuguese contemporary writers (Paper III: Lídia Jorge). For the Portuguese sub-faculty, I teach Portuguese language and translation classes, as well as Paper XII to final year undergraduates, with the option ‘Art, Literature and Gender in the Lusophone World since 1950’. I am involved in the organisation of the interdisciplinary MSt. in Women’s, Gender and Sexualities Studies, to which I also contribute with the option module ‘Gendered Bodies in Visual Art and Culture’, and I offer a module on Art Theory at the Sarah Lawrence Programme, which is run by Wadham College. 

My research sits in the field of Comparative Literature and is inherently interdisciplinary and transcultural, as it bridges the gaps between art and literature, Portuguese and transnational studies. 

I study feminist and gendered approaches to Portuguese art and literature, particularly focusing my research on contemporary women artists and writers. I am also interested in transcultural dialogues: I have analysed Anglo-Portuguese cultural relations, and published extensively on Portuguese artists and writers who, developing their practice whilst living in Britain, have probed fixed national and subjective identities. This transcultural approach is also reflected in my current research on other diasporic identities in the Portuguese-speaking world, which explores the work of Afropean women artists from the modern and contemporary periods. 

Coelho, Maria Luisa (2024). ‘Bertina Lopes: Cartographic Notes on a Transnational Artist,’ in Ana Gabriela Macedo, et al (eds.), Women, the Arts, and Dictatorship in the Portuguese-Speaking Context: Tensions, Disputes, and Post-Memory Heritage (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, Culture and Conflict series)

Coelho, Maria Luisa (2023). ‘Working from home: Portuguese women artists during Estado Novo,’ in Imogen Racz and Jill Journeaux (eds.), Artists at Home: Studio, Practices and Identities (London: Bloomsbury Publishing)

Coelho, Maria Luisa (2020), ‘Transnational, palimpsestic journeys in the art of Bartolomeu Cid dos Santos,’ in Hilary Owen and Claire Williams (eds.), Transnational Portuguese Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), 91-108. 

Coelho, Maria Luísa, and Claudia Pazos-Alonso (2019). Portuguese Studies, 35:2 (special issue: Transnational Portuguese Women Writers).

Coelho, Maria Luisa (2017), ‘Woman-Body-Paint: Helena Almeida and the Visual Inscription of Sexual Difference,’ in Luso-Brazilian Review, 57:1, 55-77. doi: 10.3368/lbr.54.1.55