We imagine that you are the proud owner of an enviable library. How did literature enter your life and in what way did this passion expand into your academic and scientific work?
I am above all the owner of a chaotic library in which, astonishingly, I find my way! Literature entered my life through my mother. A primary school teacher in the outskirts of Porto, whenever she came to the city centre to buy materials for her classes, she would also buy books for my sisters and for me. It should be said that these visits took place at rather long intervals and, therefore, the arrival of new books was not a routine. When it happened, they were days of celebration. When I accompanied her and was able to run a finger along the shelves of the bookshop, it was an even greater celebration. Books were important in our home: collections were subscribed to; a library of Portuguese literature, world literature and art history was gradually built. Reading thus became a valued activity, something special, a daily companion. Later, choosing an academic education connected with languages and literatures naturally continued and reinforced the presence of literature in my everyday life.

Travel Literature, one of your main research areas, is particularly fascinating. How would you describe the importance of Travel Literature for analysing the places cultures dichotomy and understanding the phenomenon of interculturality?
Travel books, and I reference here to works that originate in a journey that actually took place are spaces par excellence of attention to the Other. Mostly offering narratives of travel experiences centred on an “I”, the personalised writing that results from this embraces processes of identity and alterity, bringing into play a culture of belonging and another culture experienced by the writer traveller. With the help of a cognitive device that is comparison, so often present in these works, intercultural, multicultural and transcultural dynamics can be explored, opening doors for readers to develop and refine their own tools for reading and navigating a culturally diverse world. Indeed, reading travel texts makes it possible to reflect on our own inscription in particular cultural spaces and on the possibility and or difficulty of integration within a network of other cultural spaces. This is one of the many qualities and sources of fascination of travel books.

Another theme that we frequently encounter when analysing your body of work is Women’s Studies. What specific contributions does this perspective offer for interpreting literary narratives in the light of the historical contexts in which they emerge?
The world is not monochromatic. It is very important and enriching to think about the world, retrospectively and prospectively, from a plurality of voices, from a plurality of perspectives, from different social actors. Women’s Studies made it possible to trace representations, presences and voices of women that had been ignored or silenced, thus helping to make visible the role of women in the social sphere and the emergence of their action and their voice. In the course of researching a given object, sometimes it is the object itself that reveals paths that were not initially considered. This was what happened to me. When I began my doctoral project, what interested me was a journalistic space such as the feuilleton, which would allow me to study the different textual forms hosted there and would also make possible the inclusion of a transnational perspective in the analysis of that object. While working on my corpus, I realised that I could not ignore the question of a production authored by women. From that moment onwards, in my path as a reader and as a researcher, women’s writing became a constant presence, allowing me to act as a critical mediator of these creative female voices, contributing, in a modest way, to the dissemination of their literary proposals. As I am also connected with the field of French Studies, I try, for example, through my work, to make known authors who write in the French language.

The study of less erudite literary genres and forms, more popular or peripheral, also has its relevance and importance. What potential do you see in these approaches for rethinking literary canons and broadening the understanding of different cultural dynamics?
I entirely agree and, at the risk of becoming repetitive, I would again recall the importance of valuing diversity. Culture is made up of different contributions and different dynamics. Hierarchising these dynamics does not seem to me productive or reasonable. They are part of the functioning of social life and, frequently, movements of porosity appear that show us the circulation of cultural choices and processes in unlikely creative fields and that contribute to questioning, renewal and the discovery of new creative paths. One might recall Pop Art or certain Portuguese experimental poetry .

Literature is more than a sociocultural mirror, it is also a powerful instrument of social and political challenge. What is your opinion on the role of literature in the construction and deconstruction of discourses of power, identity, gender or collective memory?
First of all, I would nuance the statements contained in the question. Literature is first and foremost an aesthetic object and valid only as such. It may then also be an aesthetic object with a greater or lesser possibility of relation with a universe of known references. It may further assume an active role in the social sphere. If literature is a form of knowledge of the world and has a social dimension, it may be thought about, with regard to the uses and power of literature, as Antoine Compagnon did in What Is Literature For? in the Portuguese translation of 2010, identifying functions of literature such as a cognitive function, an ethical function and a public function. If the classical triad to please, to instruct, to move has ceased to be a guideline for poetic creation, there is no denying that literature produces effects of various kinds, difficult to measure it must be said but no less important for that reason. In truth, when we read a book we are not merely decoding a system of signs. Reading is much more than that. It is experiencing emotions triggered by other worlds and other human figures that thus reach us. It is experiencing revolt, empathy, solidarity, compassion. In the process, critical thinking may develop, reflection on the need for action may arise, and dynamics of transformation of the world, more individual or more collective, may begin. By this I mean that these immeasurable effects that I mentioned earlier may indeed lead to the construction and deconstruction of discourses of power, identity, gender or collective memory.

You are the scientific coordinator of the Institute for Comparative Literature. What would you say are the main challenges and opportunities for research in this field in the current Portuguese and European scientific context? What priorities has the Institute established?
In the current scientific context, the Humanities are indeed facing enormous, even Herculean challenges that are well known. I will highlight only some of them here. In the face of scientific policies, and the consequent funding, that tend to favour STEM areas, which are more conducive to achieving significant economic impact, it is necessary to make understood and recognised the relevance of a body of research that is not necessarily instrumentalised but which, through its hermeneutic and critical value, may become a service to the community. Another challenge linked to this is the importance of finding mechanisms for communicating science that effectively allow us to contribute and to show that we contribute to the development of scientific and cultural literacy. Reducing the gap between our academic research and society in general is a major challenge. Producing research within a framework of multilingualism is another challenge to highlight and one that is rarely remembered. As for opportunities, considering the disciplinary and methodological framework in which the Institute of Comparative Literature operates, they lie in the relevance of adopting and developing interlinguistic, intercultural, interartistic and interdiscursive perspectives. Because of its relational vocation, Comparative Literature welcomes and seeks interdisciplinary dynamics rooted in other epistemological fields. It is also open to the development of transnational projects that allow distinct literary, artistic and cultural traditions and practices to be addressed. The development of the Digital Humanities also represents an opportunity, not only for the preservation and democratisation of literary heritage but also as a space for visibility and application of our field of research. The priorities of the Institute of Comparative Literature are articulated with the challenges and opportunities I have just mentioned and, in that sense, the current strategic project Literature and Caring for the World: Times, Bodies, Communities seeks to highlight the role of comparative studies and literary criticism in understanding the complexity of the world, to promote the understanding of literature as a practice of constructing and caring for the world, and to engage with communities through critical literary approaches and concrete creative practices, in an action that has social impact but is not always, nor does it have to be, measurable. Nevertheless, it is an action that contributes to the education and empowerment of citizens and, for that reason, it is one of our priorities.

In the present context in which we live, marked by strong cultural tensions, what role can Comparative Literature play in the necessary critical and collective reflection?
As I mentioned, Comparative Literature is a field that privileges relational dynamics between literary texts, between artistic objects, between literatures, between cultures, and between disciplinary areas. This attention to relation with allows bridges to be built between different agents and between different artistic and cultural fields. Comparative Literature can therefore contribute to thinking about ourselves as beings in the world in relation, who live in a relational space and time, beings who are part, at the very least, of a vast archipelago. In that sense, by giving visibility to a whole network of relationships, or to the possibility of creating such networks, Comparative Literature helps to develop a critical way of thinking that is attentive and sensitive to the importance of cultivating and welcoming the relationship with the Other.

We could not end without asking for some recommendations of books or authors who particularly inspire you.

This is not a question one asks! It is not possible for me to choose one author, one female author, one work. Like any reader, at different moments in my life there have been works that marked me and occupied a special place, shaping me as a reader for very different reasons. Even more so, there were works whose importance for my knowledge of the world I only understood years later. I will give a very simple example, perhaps laughable for some: Five Go to Mystery Moor by Enid Blyton. This text put me in contact with a meteorological phenomenon such as fog. Only when, years later, I came to live in Porto did I really understand what that was and I remember thinking: “Ah! So this is what Blyton was describing!”. Thus, rather than recommending books or authors, as any choice would always be reductive and partial, I would perhaps prefer to highlight some ways of approaching reading that have accompanied me since childhood and that others may share: the pleasure of reading, which is the foundation of everything; curiosity and a spirit of discovery regarding what is proposed to me, whether it is a classic, a book I discover in a bookshop that has just been published, or something someone from a younger generation is reading and I want to know why the work interests them; valuing the mediation of literature in our relationship with the world; and an interest in different creative proposals, a great deal of narrative fiction and travel writing, but also graphic novels, and also poetry. At present, I am interested in works that work with or that, through their reading, provoke a questioning of the known world, whether they are Portuguese or foreign.