Maria Tavares

Maria Tavares is a Senior Lecturer and co-coordinator of Portuguese Studies at the School of Arts, English and Languages. She completed the Graduate Degree in Modern Languages and Literatures – Portuguese and English Studies – Specialization in Teacher Training at the University of Porto, in Portugal. She then moved to the UK in 2005 to complete the MA programme in European Languages and Cultures at the University of Manchester. She has also completed a PhD programme in Portuguese Studies in 2011 at the same university and under the supervision of Professor Hilary Owen. After that, she took up teaching positions at Queen's University Belfast and Queen Mary, University of London, and a position of Assistant Professor at the University of Macau, in China. In March 2014 she was appointed to her current position at Queen’s University Belfast, in Northern Ireland. Dr Tavares is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy since November 2015.

Dr Tavares's main research interests focus upon postcolonial literatures and film from Portuguese-speaking Africa, gender studies and representations of heroism. So far, her research has explored the possibilities arising from thinking nationalism and national identity through gender. She is the author of the monograph entitled No Country for Nonconforming Women: Feminine Conceptions of Lusophone Africa (Legenda: 2018). 

Dr Tavares is currently supervising PhD students whose theses focus on Lusophone African Cinema and Female African Diasporic Writing in Portugal and Spain. Both students are financed by the Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership. She is also co-supervising MRes students.

In 2017, Dr Tavares was awarded a Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust to undertake a research project on the representation of female heroism and anti-heroism in Mozambique, during the one-party era (1975-1994).

Dr Tavares teaches Portuguese language and cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world across all levels of learning, as well as Lusophone literatures and film. She teaches on the following modules:

UNDERGRADUATE

Year 1:
SPA1131 [Portuguese 1]
SPA1132 [Introduction to Lusophone Studies]

Year 2:
SPA2031 [Portuguese 2]
SPA2038 [Representations of Lusophone Africa in Postcolonial Cinema]

Final Year:
SPA3101 [Spanish 3 Mini-Module - "Travel Abroad at Home": Representations of Portugal in Post-Revolution Cinema]
SPA3131 [Portuguese 3]

POSTGRADUATE

MA/MRes:
MML7000 [Research Methods]
LAN7003 [Representations of Gender and Race in Lusophone African Literatures and Film]

STUDENT SUPPORT ROLE

Adviser of Studies for Spanish and Portuguese

PGR Lead for Modern Languages