Close Relations is the title of a new annual lecture series that prompts major academics in the Humanities to interrogate strands in western imaginative production from early modernity to postmodernity. The initial impulse for this series came from two research areas, Relational Forms and Shakespeare and the English Canon, embedded in the Porto branch of CETAPS – the Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies; but, in its deliberately broad range, the series will resonate with most of the Centre’s defining research concerns.