FID COORDINATOR
Sérgio Dias Branco is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Coimbra, where he directs the MA in Art Studies and coordinates LIPA. He has taught at Nova University of Lisbon and at the University of Kent, where he was awarded a MA and a PhD in Film Studies. Sérgio is a researcher at CEIS20 and collaborates with CITER on the project “Common Home and New Ways of Living Interculturally”. Presently, his major research project is an investigation into the representation of the theological virtues in contemporary cinema for the MAR in Theology at Durham University. He was President of AIM - Association of Moving Image Researchers between 2018 and 2020 and member of its Direction Board between 2014 and 2020. His research falls within the scientific areas of film, religious, television, and working class studies. He co-edits Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies and has published on Robert Bresson’s cinema and theology, allegory and Christian existentialism in horror film, the intersection between philosophy of film and philosophy of religion, and Islam and images, among other subjects. He is a member of “COREnet: Connecting Theory and Practical Issues of Migration and Religious Diversity”.
Maria do Rosário Lupi Bello is Assistant Professor at Universidade Aberta [Open University], in Lisbon, where she was awarded her PhD in Theory of Literature (on the narrative relationship between Literature and Film). As Guest Professor she taught Portuguese Literature at Católica - Catholic University of Portugal and Film Narratology at the University of Coimbra, and she has coordinated and lectured several MA courses in Literature and Cinema in São Paulo, Brasil (at USP, UNESP and PUC-SP). She coordinates the BA in Humanities and the MA in Comparative Studies at Universidade Aberta. She is a senior member of CECC (where she coordinates the Research Group in Literature, Cinema and Religion) and a collaborator of CETAPS - Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies. She was a member of the Direction Board of AIM between 2018 and 2020 and publishes mainly in the areas of Narrative Theory and Film Studies, especially on filmmakers such as Manoel de Oliveira, Andrei Tarkovsky, Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson.
Caterina Cucinotta teachs film at Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid, Spain. She holds a PhD in Communication Sciences – Cinema from the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of Nova University of Lisbon (2015). She is a member of the coordination of the working group “Materiality and Cinema” of AIM - Association of Moving Image Researchers. She co-organised summer schools at Nova and conferences abroad about filmic materialities. As full researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History at Nova, she develops a post-doctoral project funded by FCT with the title “Costumes and Spatial Texture: Design and Art in Portuguese Cinema of the Last 50 years”. Her PhD thesis, Viagem ao Cinema Através do Seu Vestuário [Travelling to Cinema Through Its Costumes], was published by LabCom (2018). She coordinates the video-essay section of Eikon: Journal on Semiotic and Culture. Presently, she is working on a cinema history “from below” through its materialities and crafts, focusing on the specific topic of costume design and the material relation between fashion and film.
Adriana Martins holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Católica - Catholic University of Portugal, where she also obtained her habilitation in Culture Studies. She coordinates the scientific area of Culture Studies since 2019. She is a senior member of CECC - Research Centre for Communication and Culture, integrating the team of the research line “Culture, Art and Conflict”. She has published widely on Culture Studies with a focus on film studies and comparative literature. Her main research interests are culture studies, film studies, comparative literature and intercultural communication. Her latest book is Mediations of Disruption in Post-Conflict Cinema, co-edited with A. Lopes and M. Dias (Palgrave, 2016).
Alex Villas Boas is Brazilian and currently is a member of CITER as principal researcher and its current executive coordinator. He has a PhD in Theology from PUC-Rio with a thesis on theology and literature as a dialogue about the meaning of life. Alex has done research on the relation between language and ethics with otherness and mercy issue in Pope Francis’s theology and Ignatius of Loyola’s spiritual exercises at PUC-SP and the Pontifical Gregorian University. He is guest lecturer of the Graduate Program of Theology, which coordinated (2017-2019), and guest lecturer of the Graduate Program of Human Rights and Public Policy, both of Pontifical University of Parana. Alex has been also a guest lecturer in different universities in Portugal and abroad. He was the editor in chief of Teoliteraria: Journal of Literature and Theology, from 2010 to 2020.
Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad is Research Associate at the Centre for Global Media and Communications and Associate Member at the Centre for Iranian Studies at SOAS - School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is currently the research lead in a project on Islamophobia and the media funded by the British Academy. While his publications have focused on Iranian cinema and media, questions of politics have been of foremost importance to him. Saeed’s research interests also include diasporas and transnational media, Islamophobia, communications and Shi’i Islam as well as Third Cinema. His monograph The Politics of Iranian Cinema: Film and Society in the Islamic Republic (Routledge, 2010) is groundbreaking in its ethnographic engagement with the question of media audiences in Iran. He has engaged with various research methodologies, from ethnography to digital ethnography and big data. Saeed was a postdoctoral research associate with the AHRC funded project “Tuning In: Researching Diasporas at the BBC World Service”. His teaching has spanned media and film studies, anthropology and Islamic studies at undergraduate and postgraduate levels at SOAS, the Institute of Ismaili Studies/UCL, and Roehampton University. He is an Associate Editor of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies.
Student Researchers
Sofia Cardetas Beato is a PhD student of History and Culture of Religions at the University of Lisbon. She has a Master in History and Culture of Religions from the same institution (her dissertation is entitled “Sacrifice in the Religion of Israel in the 8th Century BC: The Prophetic View”) and a BA in History from the University of Coimbra. Her research focuses on Biblical studies and Judaism, but her teaching, conference papers, organisation of scientific events, and publications have covered other topics in the history of religions, for example, post-Vedic Hinduism, Buddhist philosophy, and Islam. She collaborates with CITER on the project “Common Home and New Ways of Living Interculturally”.
Rita Benis is a PhD student in Comparative Studies and a researcher at CEC - Centre for Comparative Studies at the University of Lisbon. Her doctoral research is on the screenplays of Manoel de Oliveira. Master in Comparative Literature (cinematographic adaptation), she has taught screenwriting at the University of Lisbon and film history at Modern University. Team member of the project Cinema and the World – Studies on Space and Cinema, she co-edited the electronic magazine Falso Movimento – Studies on Writing and Cinema, and has translated and published books/articles/chapters on the relationship between writing and image. An award-winning screenwriter, she works in cinema since 2000.
Cátia Gonçalves is a PhD student in Art Studies - Film and Image Studies at the University of Coimbra. She holds a Master in Cinema from the University of Beira Interior and also has degrees in Documentary Cinema from the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar and in Theater and Education from the Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra. His research focuses on the artistic creation, self-reflection and performance of filmmakers, with a special focus on documentaries and essay films.
Silvana Mariani is a PhD student in Art Studies, specialization in film studies, at the University of Coimbra, where she develops a research about the Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán with emphasis on the relationship between politics and aesthetics. Her MA dissertation at the University of Zurich was on realism in the work of Brazilian filmmaker Alberto Cavalcanti, later published by Ibidem Publishing in Germany. In her post-graduation in film studies at the University of Tuiuti do Paraná, she investigated the concept of circular time in the films of Argentine director Edgardo Cozarinsky.
Inês Mariano is a MA student in Art Studies at the University of Coimbra and is developing a dissertation in the field of film studies with particular interest in the notion of empathy and the metaphysical intersections between body and spirit. She graduated in Art History, with a minor in Italian, from the University of Coimbra. In 2020, she completed the Scientific Research Methodologies course at the same institution with a research initiation scholarship from the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).
