Amélia P. Hutchinson

Amélia P. Hutchinson was born in Portugal where she obtained her first degree in English and German Philology at the Universidade Clássica de Lisboa, and developed her parallel interests for modern languages and Medieval Studies. In 1975, the Instituto de Alta Cultura, Lisbon, later Instituto de Língua e Cultura Portuguesas, appointed her as "Leitora in Portuguese" at the University of Manchester, UK, where she completed her M.Phil. thesis on ‘European Relations of Portuguese Arthurian Literature’. Since then, she has developed parallel careers as a medievalist and as a specialist in Portuguese Language Studies. She was Head of Portuguese Studies at the University of Salford, UK, and Erasmus coordinator for the Department of Modern Languages.

         In 1996, Amélia Hutchinson  moved to the USA. On that year she published Portuguese: An Essential Grammar (Routledge), a manual for speakers of English, which soon became Routledge's best-selling foreign language grammar, with two revised and augmented editions in August 2003 and 2019. She has published several articles on Medieval Studies, especially on Arthurian Studies and on the Cancioneiros of Galician-Portuguese Poetry. Since her doctoral thesis on 'Leonor Teles and the Construction of Female Characters in Fernão Lopes' (King's College London, 2002), she has focused her attention on Portuguese chroniclers and chronicle writing, especially regarding the role of women in medieval society and its representation in historical and literary works.

         In 2010, with a group of colleagues in the US, Canada, England and Portugal, she launched the Fernão Lopes Translation Project with the objective of publishing the first full English translation of Fernão Lopes’s chronicles in five volumes: The Chronicles of Fernão Lopes (Rochester NY, and Woodbridge UK: Boydel & Brewer / Tamesis, 2023). As co-Director and Project Manager, she was responsible for designing and updating the content of the accompanying website and database, constructed by the IT staff at the Frankling College of Arts and Sciences, UGA. 

         At present Amélia Hutchinson is a Senior Lecturer Emerita, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, a member of several academic associations, and an integrated member of IEM (Instituto de Estudos Medievais) at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, where she is a curator of the Fernão Lopes Portal hosted at this institution: fernaolopes.fcsh.unl.pt