Back in Braga (Portugal)

It has been nice to get away from the cold in Denmark for a few days and come to a meeting of the Portuguese Communication Association in beautiful, warm, sunny Braga, at the Universidade de Minho.

They invited me to do a plenary talk, otherwise I might have been headed to St. Louis, where another one of my favorite meetings, Global Fusion, is taking place simultaneously.
Conferences like this are usually fun, in part because they are often in interesting places, in part because the talks and discussions are good, and in part because you get to catch up with interesting people. Here are Francisco Sierra from the University of Seville in Spain and my own UT colleague, Rosental Alves, who I often have more time to talk to at meetings like this than back home in Austin.


I have been here a couple of times before. There are several people here who are working on the Lusophone cultural world, which really interests me. What is it that continues to tie Angola, Brazil, East Timor and Portugal together? (The really short answer is language, colonial history, and modern Brazilian popular culture, but it is more complicated than that.) Manuel Pinto,, Helena Souza, and others here are doing really interesting work, and they are nice enough to keep inviting me, and even sending plane tickets (which is a very sincere compliment).
Manuel Pinto, who organized this conference is shown here, second from right, seated, in a picture of a walking tour of the city that we did on Saturday--we are looking at the remains of the Roman amphitheater, from back when the town was Bracara Augusta). The city has been around since Roman times, so there is a lot of interesting history and architecture here.

This is the city's main cathedral, which was built on one edge of the original Roman city, apparently on top of a shrine to Isis, and made in some large part out of stones from Roman buildings. (Unfortunately I don't seem to be able to convince the blog program to not turn the picture on its side.)