Echoing Emerson's reference to eclecticism in "Literary Ethics" and his ideal for the American scholar - ‘distil all the systems' -, the primary purpose of this research group, which includes members of three different universities (Porto, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and Universidade Aberta), is to analyze what one scholar of American Studies, Cecil F. Tate, once called a ‘holistic' or systematically comprehensive approach toward the American ‘cultural gestalt' as a way to reflect on intertwining currents in American literature, culture, and thought. This inclusive methodology will examine the manner and degree to which representative contributors to the writing of America - novelists, poets, playwrights, political leaders, philosophers and social scientists - develop their distinctive voices within and against the complex spectrum of dominant subjects that inform American experience, American identity, American society.

The interdisciplinary framework of the project draws from a variety of areas - history, geography, law, social and political thought, religion, immigration and diaspora, regionalism, science fiction, art and popular culture, and capitalizes on the work that some researchers are already performing. In an age when inter-, and cross-disciplinary approaches have become the keystone of contemporary culture, the objectives of this study reach beyond the scope of literary studies to invite the aesthetic and the cultural lens into the inexhaustible resource of American intellectual tradition.

This commitment must be, perforce, a long-term project. Within the next three years this group wants to be a core promoter of initiatives that bring together several entities - faculty members, students of the master's and doctor's degree programs, outside scholars-, and to engage in different forms of exchange, both at the national and international levels. The work to be carried out includes the following strategies: to organise internal seminars for the thorough and ongoing debate of the researchers' own work-in-progress, engaging them in theoretical, methodological or cross-disciplinary discussions; to examine the great social, aesthetic, cultural and literary movements of the 19th and 20th centuries in America; to incorporate into the research activities some of the extensive scholarship that has already been done in the United States, but also elsewhere in the U.K. and throughout Europe; to make the results of the research acknowledged beyond its in-house boundaries and to contact other research centres, namely through the visit of the project's members to other national and foreign institutions, in order to improve the work accomplished; to promote lectures, seminars and colloquia, in articulation with the visits of scholars from abroad, in order to support and encourage the international circulation of researchers and their exposure at and participation in conferences both in Portugal and in other countries, taking part in roundtables or panel debates to discuss and promote the works in progress; to produce a body of scientifically-stimulating critical work with relevance in the overall context of American Studies; to organise an international conference, to be held at Universidade do Porto, in 2010, in order to produce an overall assessment of the research project.

Team Members
Carlos Manuel da Rocha Borges de Azevedo
Isabel Maria Lourenço de Oliveira Martins
Maria Teresa Lobo Castilho
Ricardo Luís Tavares da Costa Prata
Teresa Maria Dimas Botelho da Silva

Other Researchers
Gabriela Ferreira Gândara da Silva e Borges Terenas
Maria do Céu Martins Monteiro Marques
Alice Gomes Garcia van Raamsdonk