Matthew Mason successfully defended the PhD thesis “Between Situationist Critique and Postmodern Play: Contemporary (re)Readings of Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Long ‘67’” on 27 May, 2026.
Category: PhD
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Call for Applications | PhD Scholarships in Culture Studies
Applications are now open for two CECC PhD scholarships in Culture Studies commencing in the 2026/27 academic year, for a maximum period of three years.
Deadline for submissions is 19 June 2026, at 6 pm (Lisbon local time).
For more information, please consult the public notice: https://cecc.fch.lisboa.ucp.pt/sites/default/files/2026-05/CECC_Minuta_Aviso_Abertura_DEC.2026%20En.pdf
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Open call – PhD Studentships in Culture Studies
The applications are now open for applications for two PhD Studentships in the area of Culture Studies – Culture, Conflict, and Reparation.
The studentships will be funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) and the research activities will be carried out in collaboration with the Transform4Europe alliance.
The call is open between 07/05/2026 and 27/05/2026 until 23:59 (Lisbon time).
The applications and the supporting documents as specified in the Opening Call must be submitted by e-mail to cecc.fch@ucp.pt.
Find the Calls for Application below: -
Congratulations, Victoria!
Victoria Marie Page successfully defended the PhD thesis “Searching for Feminist Visual Potencia” on 3 February 2026.
Victoria had the honor of having Prof. Angela McRobbie in the jury, participating online, along other invited established scholars, including Prof. Clara Rowland and Prof. Ricardo Campos from NOVA FCSH and our own Prof. Adriana Martins, Prof. Sophie Pinto, and the President Prof. Peter Hanenberg.
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MA students curating an exhibition in collaboration with CAM
The MA students in Culture Studies of The Lisbon Consortium are curating an exhibition with the collection of CAM – Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian.
The exhibition, which will be held at the Galeria Fundação Amélia de Mello, at the Lisbon campus of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, proposes fragility not as weakness but as an active, revealing condition. Across social, personal, and perceptual dimensions, fragility exposes the tensions that form us; those that bind, unsettle, and ultimately reshape our understanding of ourselves and the worlds we inhabit.On 15 January the students visited the reading area of Institution(ing)s to discuss ideas of accessibility in innovative communication strategies with Patrícia Rosas and exhibition narratives with Rita Albergaria and Laurindo Marta.
Students: Amal Abu Nafisah, Anika Borko, Anna-Sophie Löhr, Circé Poisson, Constança Mafra, Direndra Selvanayagam, Giulia Benetti, Hajer Khade, Iana Kardanova, Imani D. Cooper, Justin Stewart Ross, Léanne Charron, Leonor Marques dos Santos Queiroz, Lucille Gerebtzoff, Margarida da Fonseca, Margarida Dias, Margarida Martins Raimundo, Melissa Lieberthal, Natalia del Río, Sarah Tober, Sarah Zammit Munro, Silvia Lomdardini, Tatiana Fraisse, Vítor Fonseca, Yoosun Choi
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Congratulations, Brian!
Brian Jay de Lima Ambulo successfully defended the PhD thesis “Contours of Resiliences: Climate futures reimagined in post-disaster Philippines” on 12 January, 2026.
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Dzifa Peters wins “Thinking Photography” prize by Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation and the German Photographic Society
We would like to congratulate Dzifa Peters for winning the Thinking Photography Award by The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation and the German Photographic Society (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie, DGPh). The Award Ceremony will take place on 14 November 2025 at Goethe-Institut Paris.
Portraits of contemporary witnesses of the independence movement in Ghana are packed for archiving. Dzifa Peters in collaboration with Josef Zky, from the project “Being a guest” (2015-present), C-print, courtesy of the artists. Dzifa Peters is a visual artist, an alumna of the Lisbon Consortium and currently a research fellow in the Integrated Human Development Scholarship program at UCP, developing her research on photography, memory and Afro-diasporic identities in the post-migration context in Portugal. The award is granted for the dissertation “Tropes of Polarity: Visual Representation and Afrodiasporic Identities” (PhD in Culture Studies). In it, Peters explores how colonial, postcolonial and Afrodiasporic identities are represented and shaped by contemporary photography. She pays particular attention to the medium’s role in preserving memory, determining belonging and communicating different cultural perspectives and identities.
The research award “Thinking Photography” is endowed with €3,000 and honours publications from the field of photographic theory and history that expand the topic area with important approaches from the humanities, cultural studies and social sciences.
The jury explained its selection as follows: “With this inspiring study, Dzifa Peters presents an academically outstanding work that addresses a current issue. In it, she uses different photographic positions and art-based research to explore changes in cultural identity through photography, focusing specifically on the context of West Africa and its diaspora in Europe. In doing so, she not only makes an important contribution to photographic research, but also provides a linguistically accentuated, differentiated and extremely well-founded text. We were particularly impressed by the skillful inclusion of her own artistic practice.”
More information: Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation and German Photographic Society award prizes for academic writing on photography
Congratulations, Dzifa!“It is a true honour to receive the “Thinking Photography” prize in recognition of my doctoral thesis, Tropes of Polarity: Visual Representation and Afrodiasporic Identities. I am deeply grateful to the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation and the German Photographic Society (DGPh) for this recognition. My heartfelt thanks go to my supervisor, Professor Isabel Capeloa Gil, and my co-supervisor, Apl. Professor Dr. Michael Basseler, whose thoughtful guidance and unwavering intellectual support have shaped this research in profound ways. I am also thankful to the members of the examining committee for their generous engagement and invaluable feedback. Above all, I owe a great debt to the artists and scholars whose ideas and creative work have inspired and informed this project from the very beginning.
The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation and the German Photographic Society (DGPh) will jointly present the “Thinking Photography” prize and the “Writing Photography” prize during an award ceremony on 14 November 2025 at the Goethe- Institut in Paris. On this occasion, I will have the pleasure of discussing my research in conversation with Lucia Halder, Curator and Head of the Photography Collection at the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne.” (Dzifa Peters)
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Congratulations, Amadea!
Amadea Kovič successfully defended the PhD thesis ”Visualizing gender through contemporary art: The cases of Portugal and Slovenia” on 16 September, 2025.
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Congratulations, Leonardo!
Leonardo Hilsdorf successfully defended the PhD thesis “Creativity as performance: On the cultural conditions of western art music interpretation” on July 24, 2025.
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Congratulations, Zohar!
Zohar Iancu successfully defended the PhD thesis “On the Borderlands of Culture: Israeli Migrants beyond the Tejo” on May 28, 2025.
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Congratulations, Alfredo!
Alfredo Brant successfully defended the PhD thesis “Photographic Poiesis: Transformative Knowledge of African Photographic Practices” on May 23, 2025.
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Congratulations, Nazaré!
Maria de Nazaré Valente de Sousa successfully defended the PhD thesis “Música, Identidade Cultural e Globalização: A Construção de uma Identidade Portuguesa na Música dos Deolinda” on May 20, 2025.
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Congratulations, Jad!
Jad Khairallah successfully defended the PhD thesis “Dialogue on Shock and Culture: The Queer Case of Beirut” on May 7, 2025.
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Alfredo Brant (PhD in Culture Studies) presents his research at InterCECCtions on April 1 at 15:30
The next InterCECCtions will feature Alfredo Brant (PhD in Culture Studies) who will discuss “Photographic Poiesis: Transformative Knowledge of African Photographic Practices”.
The session will take place on April 1 at 15:30 (Room: Brasil).
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Congratulations, João!
João Oliveira successfully defended the PhD dissertation “The Retellings of the Rāmāyaṇa and the Idea of India: Culture and Society (2010-2020)” on January 21, 2025.
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Congratulations, Teresa!
Maria Teresa Conceição da Costa successfully defended the PhD thesis Para uma cultura visual do farol: Uma abordagem semiótica a partir do bilhete-postal ilustrado on November 29, 2024.
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InterCECCtions | Maria Valentina Vallejo (MA) presents Arctic Routes, Southern Ways (28 November 2024, 5pm, Timor)
This month’s InterCECCtions will feature Maria Valentina Vallejo, MA student in Culture Studies, who will be discussing her study conducted as part of CECC‘s research project Arctic Routes, Southern Ways.
Arctic Routes, Southern Ways is a joint research project implemented by CECC members which seeks to compare/contrast two different colonial legacies – the Portuguese and the Norwegian – and create alternative narratives and methods of knowledge production in art institutions and academia.
Hegemonic narratives of the search for national unity in Norway, or the view of a “good” colonialism or “lusotropicalism”, in Portugal, bring these otherwise distant countries close in the way that such experiences have prevailed in many instances of public discourse, policies in institutional practices, in academia and in art institutions. The project will include online meetings, listening sessions in Lisbon and in Bergen, and research visits to Portugal and Norway.
The project puts together two academic institutions (CECC-Universidade Católica Portuguesa and UiT-The Arctic University of Norway) and two contemporary art centres (HANGAR, from Portugal, and Bergen Kunsthall, from Norway), and will organize several scientific activities throughout its lifetime.
Arctic routes was officially launched in 16 January 2024, is coordinated by CECC, financed by an EEA grant and supported by a Globus OpStart grant from the Nordisk Kulturfond.
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Congratulations, Hugo!
Hugo Simões successfully defended the PhD dissertation A solid mass of humanity, all on velvet: Humour, comedy and life in P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves Saga on October 11, 2024.
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Diffractions | Vernissage at Casa do Comum, November 13, 5pm
Rita Ravasco’s Tempo Sentido is moving to Casa do Comum from 13 November – 8 December.
Tempo Sentido [Time Sensed] is Ravasco’s multimedia digital and on-site installation, originally developed for the Nostalgia exhibition (Universidade Católica Portuguesa, 2024) as part of the current Diffractions issue 8 on the topic of nostalgia. The work consists of three parts: the digital issue cover in conversation with a video-animation, both accessible online, and the material piece.
In this piece Ravasco figuratively represents the human mind as a sensory archive through a web of interconnected objects, representing the way memory and nostalgia can be triggered by sensory experience, creating an endless network of memory, longing and affect across time and space. The close communication between the digital and the physical mirrors the extension of our own lives and memories into digital space and evokes a myriad of questions connected to the functioning of nostalgia as a felt experience fusing diverse memories, times and spaces in the human mind as it is triggered by the physical and the digital.
The piece has been funded by CECC – The Research Centre for Communication and Culture.
You can find the issue of Diffractions about Nostalgia here: https://revistas.ucp.pt/index.php/diffractions/Curators: Amadea Kovič, Emily Passos Duffy, Miriam Thaler
We hope to see you there!
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Congratulations, Nina!
Nina Danilova successfully defended the PhD dissertation Watching Oneself Live: Contemporary Art Negotiating The Temporality Of Déjà Vu on October 29, 2024.
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Culture and Artificial Intelligence | October 22
PhD candidates in Culture Studies Aishwarya Kumar Iyer, Amadea Kovič, Teresa Weinholtz and Thales Alecrim took part in a conversation about culture and artificial intelligence with Alexandre Quintanilha (Biophysics researcher), Carlos Fiolhais (Professor of Physics), William Hasselberger (Director of the Digital Ethics Laboratory @ UCP) and Rudolfo Quintas (artist).
Other speakers at the event were Maria Calado (President of Centro Nacional de Cultura), Guilherme d’Oliveira Martins (Executive Trustee of Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian) , Sneska Quaedvlieg – Mihailovic (Secretary General of Europa Nostra).The event was organized by Centro Nacional de Cultura in partnership with the Lisbon City Hall, The Lisbon Consortium FCH-UCP at Beato Innovation District. Copyright of the photos @ Enric Vives-Rubio.
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LXC @ Culture and Artificial Intelligence
PhD candidates in Culture Studies are taking part in a conversation about culture and artificial intelligence with Alexandre Quintanilha (Biophysics researcher), Carlos Fiolhais (Professor of Physics), William Hasselberger (Director of the Digital Ethics Laboratory @ UCP) and Rudolfo Quintas (artist). The event that is organized by Centro Nacional de Cultura in partnership with the Lisbon City Hall, The Lisbon Consortium FCH-UCP and Unicorn Factory, takes place at Beato Innovation District at 17:00 on October 22, 2024.
The session will feature simultaneous English-Portuguese/Portuguese-English translation.
Free entry depending on room capacity.
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Congratulations, Dzifa!
Dzifa Peters successfully defended the PhD thesis “Tropes of Polarity: Visual Representation of Afrodiasporic Identities” on September 10, 2024.
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Congratulations, Reuben!
Reuben Connolly Ross successfully defended the PhD thesis “The Global Street: Reflections on Visual Culture, Urban History, and the Right to the City” on June 4, 2024.
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Congratulations, Eduardo!
Eduardo Prado Cardoso successfully defended the PhD thesis “Enredar a morte: assassinatos digitalizados no Brasil dos anos 2010” on May 13, 2024.
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AYNI | Igor Jesus: Time Machine (2023) Galeria Antecâmara 28.3. 18h
We would like to invite you to the fifth installation of Ayni: Theorems of Reciprocity, the multi-media installation Time Machine (2023), by Igor Jesus. This installation integrates photography, movement, interactive sound, and radio elements and will premiere at Galeria Antecâmara, on the 28th of March 2024, from 6 p.m. Join us as we watch Time Machine transition from day to night.
Presented at Antecamara starting on the 28th March to 4th May 2024, Igor’s Time Machine explores philosophical perspectives that give priority to human-centric views of reality. Consistent with Igor practice, the exhibition highlights that creativity and artistic expression have the special power to make visible what is invisible.The work, in conversation with the physical space of the here and now, also pulsates with dynamic sound and visual effects, offering a sensory journey that extends beyond the boundaries of the gallery space.
Time Machine builds on Igor Jesus’s previous works, including Poem of Fire (2021), where he blended classical and electronic music together with light and astrological activity. Inspired by the unfinished work of Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1871–1915), Poem of Fire explored the modeling of sound after the visual, using a NASA database to translate solar pulses into song. Lastly, by framing the piece’s multisensory elements within Galeria Antecâmara, one can imagine Jesus’s narrative infusing the hollowed spaces of the building’s architecture, while also, due to the space’s exhibitionism-ready windows, extending beyond the confines of the gallery.
Igor Jesus lives and works in Lisbon and has a degree in Sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon. In 2013, he won the first prize in the ICA (Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual) competition for the making of short films. Igor most recent group exhibitions include: HangarOut – EntreLinhas, Palácio Marquês de Abrantes (2017), 2016 Artists’ Film International (at MAAT, Lisbon, Whitechapel Gallery, London, Istanbul Modern, Turkey, GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo, Italy, and Projecto 88, Mumbai, India).
Curated by PhD and MA Students in Culture Studies at The Lisbon Consortium, Universidade Católica Portuguesa: Teresa Weinholtz, Aishwarya Kumar, Rosalind Murphy, Ida Svee and Joana Nóbrega. In the framework of the seminar in Curatorial Practices, coordinated by Luísa Santos. Support: República Portuguesa – Cultura | DGARTES – Direção-Geral das Artes.
Learn more about the project on AYNI website and instagram. -
Book Launch | Sarah Nagaty — The Collective Dream: Egyptians Longing for a Better Life 26.02. 18h30
The launch of Sarah Nagaty’s book The Collective Dream: Egyptians Longing for a Better Life will take place on the 26th of February at 18h30 in Sala Brasil (Library building, UCP).
There will also be a roundtable discussion on revolutionary dreams in Latin America and Pan-Arabism with Prof. Peter Hanenberg (CECC), Dima Mohamed (IFILNOVA) and Iyari Martinez (CECC).
Congratulations, Sarah! -
Kristine Dizon wins the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship grant
We would like to congratulate our PhD alumna Kristine Dizon for obtaining the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship grant for the research project “Situated Resonances: Poetic-Musical Performances in Critical Contexts and Creative Compositions” at Concordia University. Congratulations, Kristine!
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2024-2025 Applications are open!
The applications for masters and doctoral programs are now open.
Early Bird: January 15 to February 26
1st phase: February 27 to April 8
2nd phase: April 9 to May 30
More information available here. -
Congratulations, Linda!
Linda Koncz successfully defended the PhD thesis “Languages of Imagination: Films and Dreams” on January 10, 2024.
The Lisbon Consortium 