João Pedro Aido interviews Hélio Alves

Abstract

Hélio J. S. Alves [1] is a professor at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon. He was President of the Portuguese Association of Comparative Literature (2013-2018) and Director of the Centre for Comparative Studies (2021-2025).
He studied at the University of London (King’s College and Queen Mary College), where he graduated in Portuguese and Brazilian studies, with a minor in Russian studies, and where he obtained, with Distinction, a Master of Arts in Romance Languages ​​and Literatures (1986).
For many years he taught at the University of Évora, an institution where he obtained his doctorate in 1999 and where he defended his habilitation thesis in 2008. He taught at the University of Macau for one year (2019) and also lectured and/or examined at the Universities of Berlin (Freie), New York (The Graduate Center), Oxford, Pavia, and Paris-IV Sorbonne, in addition to being a guest lecturer at various higher education institutions in Europe and the Americas.
His attention to the Humanities has been constant and broad-ranging, specializing in the teaching and research of European and Portuguese Renaissance literature. Among his various contributions to a greater understanding of Portuguese literature from a cosmopolitan perspective, he has published on the theatre of Gil Vicente (Vicente, Shakespeare and the art of time in the “Auto da Índia”; The theatre of Gil Vicente and European literature of the Modern Age; etc.), on versification in Francisco de Sá de Miranda (Changing rhythm, changing sex; The poetic language of Sá de Miranda) and concerning the relationship between poetry and painting in Jerónimo Corte-Real (Cervantes’s Portuguese painter; Corte-Real, ¿el primer poeta-pintor del paisaje y de la perspectiva?).
Among dozens of books, book chapters and articles in academic journals, he is the author of Camões, Corte-Real e o Sistema da Epopeia Quinhentista (2001), Tempo para Entender. Comparative History of Portuguese Literature (2006), Poets Who Weren’t Camões (2018, co-authored with Landeg White), and Thirty Years of Camões: Essays and Interventions 1991-2021 (2024).
He has organized, introduced, and annotated anthologies of 16th-century Portuguese poetry and regularly publishes on subjects within his area of ​​expertise.
He has recorded two original albums for solo piano.

[1] The author writes using the 1945 spelling.