Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa Santos,[1] usually known as Maria Irene Ramalho, is a Portuguese professor emerita of American Studies and Feminist Studies at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Coimbra (FLUC), in Portugal, as well as a former Assistant Professor International in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the USA.
In 2008, she was the first non-American to be awarded the Mary C. Turpie Prize by the American Studies Association (ASA) for outstanding abilities and achievement in American studies teaching, advising, and program development, and in 2018, she received the Medal of Scientific Merit, awarded by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education of Portugal.
[2] Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa Santos completed a degree in Germanic Philology at the University of Coimbra in 1964.
There, as a student of the noted literary critic Harold Bloom, she obtained a PhD in American Studies in 1974 with a thesis entitled Poetry in Hesperia: Wallace Stevens and the Romantic Tradition.
[7] In 1992, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the death of Walt Whitman, she promoted the idea of International Poets Meetings in Coimbra.