Mapping Utopianisms

The team was created in 2004 after the 5th International Conference of the Utopian Studies Society / Europe held in Porto. This event brought together a concentration of Portuguese academics working in the field of Utopian Studies. After the conference, researchers from four Portuguese universities – Porto, New University of Lisbon, Coimbra and Aveiro – created the Mapping Dreams: British and North American Utopianism project.

From the outset, the team has networked with foreign research centres and academics affiliated with Bologna (Italy) and Limerick (Ireland) universities. Further to this, it has developed collaborative work with the universities of Carlos III / Madrid and Seville (Spain), Lublin and Gdansk (Poland), Cyprus, Campinas and the Federal de Alagoas (Brazil), Ferrara (Italy) and the Central European University (Hungary). The team is also closely connected with the Utopian Studies Society / Europe and has hosted several of its international annual conferences: in 2004 and 2009 (Porto), in 2016 (Lisbon), and in 2019 (virtual conference).

Over this period, the team has benefited from the work of young researchers who became involved in the group’s activities while doing their MAs. These researchers are now either holders of Ph.Ds or are preparing their Doctoral dissertations; some are already postdocs doing our ARUS—Advanced Research in Utopian Studies programme.

The energy and diversity of interests of this task force of young researchers have influenced the new research directions the team is currently taking. If, in the past, attention has been mainly paid to canonical utopias, current research interests include feminist, green and blue utopianism, steampunk, and young adult literature, just to state a few examples. The concept of utopianism we now work with has also become broader: our research corpus includes not only the texts that fall into the category of what we would call conventional literary utopianism (following the narrative structure defined by Thomas More’s Utopia) but also other literary forms, from graphic novels to hyperutopias (literary texts posted on the Internet), from film to theatre, from installations to the performing arts.

The group made a significant contribution to the advancement of Utopian Studies when it created a theoretical framework for the field of Utopian Food Studies, resulting from the intersection between Utopian Studies and Food Studies. This study – which was framed as the ALIMENTOPIA research project, jointly developed by CETAPS and ILC-ML, and funded by FCT – originated several conferences and publications that testify to the topic’s potential. It has, in fact, recently benefited from the attention of our Junior Researchers in Anglo-American Studies who have worked on the construction of databases manifesting the importance of food in utopian literary texts and the impact vegetarianism had on utopian literature and utopian thinking in the past century.

Blue Utopianism is the new field we are exploring and plan to invest in over the next five years. Although the field still needs a theoretical framework, it seems quite evident that the sea has had an important place since the beginning of utopia as a literary genre in 1516. Undersea worlds (or the sea seen as the “garden” of the earth) are also naturally part of Sci-Fi narratives, which we aim to study.

The impact of Digital Humanities on our research group has been particularly important. Several of our young researchers have resorted to digital tools for their doctoral and postdoctoral research. The group has also contributed to the creation of important digital resources, such as the ARUS / Lyman Tower Sargent database, the Portuguese Vegetarians Database, or the Blue Utopias database (the latter is still under construction).

CETAPS’ main outreach project, Utopia 500 / Valongo, a Utopian City, stemmed from the group’s activities. The municipality has embraced it and integrated it into the transversal activities of Valongo’s schools. This outreach project has benefited from the energy of almost 100 Erasmus trainees from all over the world and has impacted more than 5,000 high school students over the past 10 years.

The team has also invested in the presentation of papers at many international conferences, which have further manifested as publications in peer-review journals such as Utopian Studies, Morus, Utopolis, Journal of the Seneca University, Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens, Études Britanniques Contemporaines, Femspec, Utopia and Utopianism, and volumes published in English with international distribution (Palgrave, Cambridge University Press, Praeger Publishers). After 20 years of consistent work, the group is internationally acknowledged for its publications; some of its members belong to the boards of important societies and scientific journals.

The team is also responsible for creating a specialism in Utopian Studies within the University of Porto’s doctoral programme in literary, cultural, and interartistic studies.