Frank F. Sousa (Fajã dos Vimes, São Jorge, Azores, 1958) emigrated to California in 1967, at the age of nine. He graduated in Psychology from Santa Clara University in 1980 and earned a PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1992.
Since 2014, he has been Professor of Portuguese, Founding Coordinator of the Portuguese Program and Founding Director of the Saab Center for Portuguese Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell (UML). In 2020, he also established the Portuguese American Digital Archive (PADA) with a $300,000 grant from the William M. Wood Foundation. In May 2023, he received a second grant of the same amount from the foundation.
From 1990 to 2013, at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, he founded Tagus Press and served as General Editor of two book series, the Portuguese in the Americas Series and the Adamastor Series, which published 26 volumes, including the first English-language editions of The Sermon of Saint Anthony to the Fish and Other Texts (2009), by Father António Vieira; The Correspondence of Fradique Mendes (2011), by Eça de Queirós; and Maiden and Modest: A Renaissance Pastoral Romance (2012), by Bernardim Ribeiro.
As editor of the Portuguese in the Americas Series, also published by Tagus Press, he oversaw more than twenty titles between 2003 and 2013, covering fiction, poetry, literary and sociological studies, and history, making a significant contribution to the development of the field of Portuguese American Studies.
He proposed and led the initiatives that resulted in the establishment of the Portuguese Summer Course (1994), the Center for Portuguese Studies (1996), the Department of Portuguese (2000), the Hélio and Amélia Pedroso/Luso-American Foundation Endowed Chair in Portuguese Studies (2001), the Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives Endowment (2005), the Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives (2009), and the Portuguese-American Digital Newspaper Collections (2009).
Among his own publications are O Segredo de Eça: Ideologia e Ambiguidade em A Cidade e as Serras (Edições Cosmos, 1996), the critical edition of A Cidade e as Serras (Imprensa Nacional, 2025), and numerous studies on Luso-American literature. O Segredo de Eça contributed to a turning point in Queirosian Studies, encouraging the reinterpretation and reassessment of what is known as the “Later Eça.” He was a Fulbright scholar at the National Library of Portugal in 1989–90 and again in the autumn of 1995.
Over the years, he has served on the boards of Mass Humanities (the state-level affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities), the Portuguese American Citizenship Project, a major initiative supported by FLAD for more than ten years, and the Portuguese American Leadership Council of the United States (PALCUS). For many years, he has also been a member of the Cultural Council of the Eça de Queiroz Foundation.
In 1997, he was awarded the rank of Commander of the Order of Prince Henry by the President of the Portuguese Republic. In 2000, he received the UMass President’s Community Service Award; in 2006, he was named PALCUS Educator of the Year; and in 2010, he was awarded the Medal of Merit by the Government of the Autonomous Region of the Azores.
Frank F. Sousa has been Portugal’s World Advisor since September 2026.