Full Professor at the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon, retired in 2007. He has been a lecturer in the Department of Romance Literatures at the same school since 1974, in the fields of Poetics (Literary Theory, Literary Semiotics, Methods of Literary Analysis and Reading, Research Methodologies) and African Literatures in Portuguese, specializing in Cape Verdean Culture and Literature and Travel Literature. He has been a guest lecturer at universities in various European and African countries, Brazil, and, in particular, Cape Verde, a country with which he has maintained a continuous working relationship for several decades. Researcher at the Centre for History of the University of Lisbon, where he is member of the research group Cultural Encounters and Intersecting Societies. He is interested in theoretical and essayistic research into Cape Verdean historiography, culture and literature, travel literature and Portuguese-language African literature. Born in Ribatejo, in the municipality of Santarém (Moçarria, 02/12/1937), the city where he began his high school studies, resumed in Lisbon (1950s), in the technical area of laboratory chemistry, then reordered (1960s) for the Humanities.