Professor
Simon Park
Associate Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Portuguese
Tutorial Fellow
Academic background
BA MSt DPhil (Oxon)
Teaching
Simon is responsible for students reading Portuguese at St Anne’s, Merton, and Lincoln. He gives lectures and tutorials on various aspects of Portuguese literature in the early modern period, including prelims (paper IV) and FHS courses (papers VII, X, XII, and XIV), and teaches translation classes (Portuguese to English) at all levels.
In Trinity Term 2019, Simon was a Faculty Fellow at the Ashmolean Museum, developing a new course that brings the literature of the discoveries in contact with the material and visual culture of the age.
Research
Simon’s research focuses on literature from across the Portuguese-speaking world in the Early Modern period. He is particularly interested in the Sociology of Literature, Literary History, and History of the Book, and combines digital approaches to texts with philology and close reading.
Simon is also interested in Portuguese Modernism(s) and has recently edited a book on the work of Mário de Sá-Carneiro and is working on a translation of selected poems by Florbela Espanca.
Selected publications
Books
Wreckers: Disaster in the Age of Discovery (Penguin/Viking, 2025)
Poets, Patronage, and Print in Sixteenth-Century Portugal: From Paper to Gold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021)
Edited books
(edited with Fernando Beleza) Mário de Sá-Carneiro, A Cosmopolitan Modernist (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2016)
Peer-reviewed articles
(Forthcoming) ‘Rewriting the Canon: A Sonnet by the Marquesa de Alorna’
‘Um mapa de resistência?’ [on Os Lusíadas Canto X], Camões: Revista de letras e culturas lusófonas, 28 (2024), 71–5
‘New Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse: A Creative-Critical Experiment‘, Exemplaria, 33.3 (2021), 296-311 (open access)
‘Some Versions of the Good Life in Diogo Bernardes’s O Lima‘, Letterature d’America, 180 (2020), 27-46
‘Marian Demotion: An Engraving of the Virgin and Child in Early Modern China and Problems of Cross-Cultural Translation’, Source: Notes in the History of Art, 39.4 (2020), 252–61
‘Authorship and Originality in Seventeenth-Century Iberia: Faria e Sousa’s Rimas Várias de Luís de Camoens‘, Renaissance Studies, 34.2 (2020), 228–42
‘Diogo Bernardes’s Brandura’, MLQ, 78.4 (2017), 465-89
‘‘O What Words Can Do!’: Rhetoric and the Moral Ambiguities of António Ferreira’s Castro’, Portuguese Studies, 33.1 (2017), 7-21
‘Problemas de género n’O Lima de Diogo Bernardes: A questão do mecenato’, Veredas, 23 (2015), 127-44
Book Chapters
(Forthcoming) ‘Goa, c. 1560: Petrarchism and Racialization in Early Modern Portuguese Lyric Poetry’, Early Modern Europe and its Global Connections, ed. by Warren Boutcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
‘Faria e Sousa e o empréstimo poético nas Divinas y humanas flores (1624)’, in Un polígrafo portugués en la Monarquía Hispánica. Manuel de Faria e Sousa (1590-1649), ed. by Aude Plagnard and Joseph Roussiès (Madrid: Calambur, 2023)
‘The Scribes of the Old Pillory: Hired Hands and their Customers in Sixteenth-Century Lisbon’, in Literature, Learning, and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Neil Kenny (Oxford: British Academy/OUP, 2022), pp. 241–57
‘Beyond Comprehension: Language, Identity and the Transnational in Gil Vicente’s Theatre’, in Hilary Owen and Claire Williams, eds, Transnational Portuguese Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), pp. 167–82
‘Eu serei então um bárbaro?’: Art, Desire, and Artistic Belonging in Mário de Sá-Carneiro’, in Fernando Beleza and Simon Park, eds, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, A Cosmopolitan Modernist (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2016), pp. 91-112
Translations
Poets of the Alentejo, ed. by Ana Luisa Vilela and Antonio Saez Delgado, trans. by Simon Park (Lisbon: Shantarin, 2022)
Florbela Espanca, This Sorrow that Lifts Me Up, ed. by Cláudia Pazos-Alonso, trans. by Simon Park (Lisbon: Shantarin, 2022)
Extracts from ‘História do Descobrimento e Conquista da Índia pelos Portugueses’ by Fernão Lopes de Castanheda’ and ‘Tratado dos Descobrimentos’ by António Galvão, The Philippine History Retrieval Project [https://portugalphilippines.fcsh.unl.pt/philippine-history-retrieval/]
Mário de Sá-Carneiro, ‘Beyond-Boredom & That Other One’, Santa Barbara Portuguese Studies, 1 (2017)
Helena Buescu, ‘Small Holocausts: The Devastation of the Self’, in Stephen Parkinson and Cláudia Pazos Alonso, eds, Reading Literature in Portuguese (Oxford: Legenda, 2013)