CETAPS (Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies) is the result of a merger between two previously existing research units: IEI, the Institute for English Studies, based at FLUP, and CEAP, the Centre for Anglo-Portuguese Studies, based at FCSHUNL.

The activity of CETAPS in the period 2007-2010 is expected to reflect the synergies derived from that merger. It will therefore combine new ventures with the extension of some of the defining projects of its ongoing, but now reformulated groups.

The researchers at CETAPS are aware that they launch their expanded unit at a moment in the Humanities that is both challenging and auspicious, in two complementary ways:

- on the one hand, the prevalence in recent decades of critical mores that are averse to any form of disciplinary autarky proves favourable to a set of projects that are eminently relational - involving the study of reception, translation, intertextuality, intermediality, representations of temporal and spatial dynamics, relations in intellectual history;

- on the other hand, the broad consensus that such relational models have generated allows for the discourses that earlier legitimised their rise to relinquish their potentially (and paradoxically) exclusive import; hence, a range of disciplinary approaches that might otherwise be relegated as "traditional" and superseded can be productively retrieved into a more plural scene of academic inquiry. Relevant examples of this include the renewed convergence of criticism and certain forms of textual scholarship; or the recent querying of radical forms of historicism and the re-signification of "presentism".

Against this background, the new research designs to which CETAPS will commit itself, in order to enhance its international status and the quantity and quality of its output, include - as features that concern all its research groups :

1. setting up international graduate programmes through protocols with several European universities; a basis for this will be provided by already established institutional links such as:

1.1. the link between CEAP and the University of Birmingham, reflecting symmetrical research purposes in reception studies (Anglo-Portuguese, Luso-British);

1.2. the agreements recently drafted between IEI and

1.2.1. the universities of Berlin (FU), Utrecht and Murcia with a view to convergent projects, to be in place by 2008, under the general heading Transcultural English Studies;

1.2.2. the universities of London (Royal Holloway), Limerick and Bologna for a thematic network and graduate programme on Utopian Studies;