Joana Gaspar De Freitas

e-mail | jgasparfreitas@letras.ulisboa.pt

She holds a Ph.D. in Contemporary History from the University of Lisbon (2011) and is a lecturer in the History Department and a researcher at the History Centre of the University of Lisbon. She participated in the digitisation, and study of Manuel de Arriaga’s private papers. Her first book – Manuel de Arriaga: percurso intelectual e político de um republicano histórico (2010) – the biography of the first President of the Portuguese Republic, was published by the National Commission for the Centenary of the Republic. In the last decade, she has devoted herself to the study of coastal areas from the perspective of environmental history, analysing and reflecting on the transformations that have taken place in this territory as a result of human activity and the forces of nature, assessing their consequences and the challenges of managing them in order to maintain populations and urban centres in an environment of great instability and risk. Between 2018 and 2024, she was the coordinator of the DUNES: Sea, Sand & People project, funded by a Starting Grant from the European Research Council, and has published her second book, A Global Environmental History of Coastal Dunes (Routledge, 2024), as well as several articles and book chapters on the subject. She is co-editor of the journal Coastal Studies & Society and a member of the permanent committee of the BRASPOR network, an informal Portuguese-Brazilian network of researchers working on Atlantic coastal zones. In 2014 and 2015 she was a Linda Hall Library Fellow (USA) and a Rachel Carson Fellow (Germany).