Dr. Leonor Simas-Almeida was born in Lisbon, Portugal, where in 1975 she received a B. A. in Portuguese Literature and in 1979 a "Licenciatura" in Romance Philology. For fourteen years she taught in Portugal. In 1989 she was sent by ICALP (currently "Instituto Camões") to Brown University to teach Portuguese language and culture. At Brown, she received an M.A (1999) and a PhD (2004) in Comparative Literature. From 1989 to the present, she has been teaching courses in Portuguese language, culture and literature and, more recently, in Lusophone African Literature at the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies. Dr. Simas-Almeida's teaching and research cover different periods and different genres of Portuguese literature. However, her work is more particularly centered on narrative fiction and, lately, it has been reflecting a strong interest in the cognitive role of emotions in literary analysis. Having started by applying her focus on "intelligent emotions" to 19th century narrative and to comparative literature (her primary field of scholarship), she has extended her theoretical approach both to 20th century Portuguese fiction and to African lusophone literature. Literary translation is another area of special interest for Dr. Simas-Almeida who has published translations of essays and short stories from English into French and, for the most part, from English into Portuguese.
