Considering the diverse and contradictory ways of defining travel and escape, Manuela Ribeiro Sanches will concentrate on modern understandings of movement to emphasize their relation to the affirmation of colonialism and their consequences for contradictory forms of (im)mobility, with a special emphasis on the Portuguese context. Travel in its modern forms also raises questions about the relations between the modern nation­state and colonialism, and the ways in which these understandings are being challenged by other paths and histories that unsettle narrow understandings of modernity in post(neo)colonial times.

Manuela Ribeiro Sanches is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon, where she teaches a wide range of subjects in the area of cultural and post­colonial studies. She has also taught at the Department of Comparative Literature, Indiana University, Bloomington, and at the Institut für Europäische Ethno­ logie, Humboldt­Universität zu Berlin. She has been a resident scholar at the Center for Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, and at the Institut für Europäische Ethnologie, Hum­ boldt Universität zu Berlin. She is a researcher at the Centre for Comparative Studies at the University of Lisbon, where she coordi­ nates the project “Dislocating Europe. Post­Colonial Perspectives in Literary, Anthropological and Historical Studies”.