Daniela Spina is a FCT Junior Researcher at CHAM (CEEC 2023), where she carries out
the project "Narrating the young. A comparative study on representation and self-representation
of colonial youth in South Asia and East Africa: from colonial press to postcolonial
fiction (1930-1970)". From 2021 to 2023 she worked as a Lecturer in Textual and Comparative
Studies at the Università di Verona (Italy). Also at this time (2021-2023), she was
a member of the FCT-funded project PORT ASIA – Writing Asia in Portuguese: mapping
literary and intellectual archives in Lisbon and Macau (1820-1955), developed at the
Centre for Comparative Studies of the Universidade de Lisboa. In 2022, she joined
the Executive Board of the International Group for Studies of the Colonial Periodical
Press of the Portuguese Empire. Since 2018 she has been a member of the research group
Thinking Goa, at the Universidade de São Paulo, and since 2015, a member of the research
group ORION – Portuguese Orientalism at the Centre for Comparative Studies. Her current
research project deepens the study of the postcolonial coming-of-age novel, specifically,
novels written by authors of the Indian Ocean region (Zanzibar, Mozambique, Goa, and
Sri Lanka), intersecting the representation of colonial youth in postcolonial fiction
with self-representations in periodicals edited by young agents during colonialism
(1930-1970). She carries a P.h.D. in Comparative Studies from the Universidade de
Lisboa (2020), and in her doctoral thesis, she studied the formation and writing of
literary historiography of Goa written in Portuguese language. She also carries a
master’s in Postcolonial and Comparative Literatures from the Università di Bologna
(2014) and a bachelor’s degree in Foreign Languages and Literatures (2011) from the
same institution. During the last years, she worked as a teacher in the Portuguese
high school and also as a translator.