Features
All Things Portuguese
New language courses, seminars mesh with prof's interest in Portugal's ‘Golden Age'
BY TERESA PITMAN
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| Prof. Susannah Ferreira hopes more and more students will recognize the value of learning Portuguese. Photo by Martin Schwalbe |
The seeds of history professor Susannah Ferreira's interest in all things Portuguese were sown when she was just nine years old. Her family moved from Ontario for two years to a fairly isolated community in West Java, Indonesia, that didn't have many educational opportunities. As a result, Ferreira did her studying through correspondence courses, which turned out to be considerably outdated.
“The social studies courses had a lot of emphasis on overseas expansion and the building of empires,” she says.
Living in Indonesia, parts of which had been settled by the Portuguese and later the Dutch, Ferreira was gaining another perspective on the issue first-hand. “I developed an early interest in colonization and European overseas empires,” she says.
That interest led her to Trent University, where she took courses on European overseas expansion as part of her history degree. As she moved on to an MA/PhD program at Johns Hopkins University, she realized that little research had been done on Portuguese domestic history during the country's “Golden Age” of expansion. So she decided to examine Portugal's political culture at the turn of the 16th century as part of her dissertation.
To complete her research, Ferreira had to learn Portuguese and spend two years in Lisbon. Her time there deepened her interest in Portugal and its culture, but mastering the language wasn't easy for her.
“Learning the language as an adult was hard. I read it better than I speak it, and because I work with 15th- and 16th-century sources, I find it really hard to spell modern Portuguese.”
Her stay in Lisbon brought another benefit: it was there that she met her husband.
After completing her PhD, Ferreira taught at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland for a year before joining U of G in 2004. Since then, she's been excited to see the growing interest in Portuguese and Brazilian language and culture in the College of Arts, as well as in the University as a whole.
One of the most recent developments is the launch of two introductory courses in Portuguese in the School of Languages and Literatures (SOLAL). “That opens a door into the culture,” she says. “With the growing influence of Brazil in economic and business arenas, it's a valuable language for people to know. I hope more and more students recognize that.”
Portuguese is the official language of nine countries and is ranked sixth in the world in terms of number of native speakers.
Other on-campus initiatives that Ferreira is excited about are SOLAL's series of Brazilian film nights and the Department of History's Portuguese (Luso)-Atlantic seminars, which feature speakers with expertise in the history of Brazil and the Portuguese Empire. The seminar series has already hosted José Pedro Paiva of the Universidade de Coimbra and A.J.R. Russell-Wood of Johns Hopkins University. Next up is a talk by Ivana Elbl of Trent University March 9 at 12:30 p.m. in Room 116 of the Crop Science Building. She will discuss “Chivalric Ethos and the Portuguese Slave Raids in the Atlantic Sahara, 1441-1446.”
That's close to the period Ferreira covered in her dissertation, which compared the courts of Manuel I of Portugal (1495-1521) and Henry VII of England (1485-1509).
“Portugal at the time was a powerful kingdom and was undertaking a major program of overseas expansion,” she says. “The Portuguese royal court, in comparison with its European counterparts, became very wealthy through revenue from the spice trade. The English court had to rely on domestic revenues and profits of intracontinental trade.”
On the other hand, the courts in both countries were expanding in similar ways, she says.
“Both kingdoms undertook significant programs of administrative reform aimed at maximizing their income, allowing them to increase the size of their courts. And both kings used the expansion of the court as a response to the overwhelming political pressures they were feeling at the turn of the 16th century.”
What surprised her most during her research was how cosmopolitan the Portuguese court was in the 15th and 16th centuries and the degree of cultural interaction that it housed.
“A general assumption is that people didn't travel much in those days and that kingdoms were fairly insular, but there was actually a great deal of pan-European contact and influence at the royal court in this period.”
Ferreira is now expanding part of her thesis into a book and expects to finish it within the next two years. She's also expanding her family — she and her husband are expecting their third child in June.