António Branco, former rector of the University of Algarve (UAlg), will be the representative of the Bloco de Esquerda's candidacy in the Algarve in the next Legislatures on March 10th.
The former rector of the University of Algarve announced, in a statement on social media, the reasons that led him to accept BE's invitation and to «come out of silence and into the public space where major political battles are fought».
António Branco considers that these elections “will be especially important for defining the quality of responses […], that is, for the choices that will guide future public policies aimed at solving the most serious problems”.
The leader of the Bloco de Esquerda also refers to the context of political representation in the Algarve.
«In the last legislature, the Algarve greatly missed its parliamentary representation of the Left Bloc. All opinion studies show that the Bloc is in a position to recover this representation,” he wrote.
António Branco considers that the leader of the Bloco de Esquerda list, José Gusmão, will be «a deputy of great quality, permanently involved in the region's most pressing problems and committed to the urgency of improving its economic-social realities» and refers to the presence of Guadalupe Simões in second place on the list as a sign «of the Left Bloc's openness to civil society and activists who have fought so hard for quality public services».
António Branco was born in Malange (Angola), in 1961. Between 1979 and 1983, he was an actor at Teatro do Mundo, an independent theater group based in Lisbon.
He was also a composer and musician, having participated in several concerts by José Mário Branco and at the Festival da Canção RTP, in the 1980s (Quarteto Música em Si, Esta Página em Branco) and 1981 (individually, Tanto e Tão Little ).
In 1989, he graduated in Modern Languages and Literature from the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lisbon. After having worked as a teacher in the Third Cycle of Basic Education and Secondary Education, between 1984 and 1990, and having been a trainee assistant at the Department of Portuguese Studies at the University of East Asia (Macau, 1990-1991), he began, in September 1991, teaching at the University of Algarve as a guest assistant, in the area of Literary Studies.
In January 1999, he received his PhD in Literature (Medieval Portuguese Literature) from the same University. He has been an associate professor in Didactics of Languages and Literatures at the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences since 2003, having completed his aggregation there in Communication, Culture and Arts, in June 2012, more precisely in the area of Theatre, in which he is currently researching. .
He was artistic director of A Peste – Associação de Pesquisa Teatral, a group founded at the University of Algarve, where he developed theatrical activity between 2008 and 2015, as an actor and director.
At the University of Algarve, he has held several management positions, namely: director of the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences,
director of the Library and Central Archive and coordinator of the Center for Research in Arts and Communication. He was also an elected member of the General Council, between 2009 and 2013, and director of the Masters and Doctorate in Communication, Culture and Arts.
Throughout his academic career, he published several articles, book chapters and books on the subjects he investigated, having supervised a large number of master's dissertations and doctoral theses.
Between 2002 and 2007, he collaborated with the Educational Assessment Institute of the Ministry of Education, as co-author of the 3rd Cycle Portuguese Language Assessment Tests, and consultant, auditor, co-author and coordinator of National Portuguese Language Exams (3rd cycle and Secondary Education) and Portuguese Literature (Secondary Education).
In 2018 and 2019, he was coordinator of the Educational Sciences evaluation panel in the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia's Individual Doctoral Scholarship Competition.
He served as rector of the University of Algarve between 2013 and 2017. Following this, in 2019, he published the book “Transitorially Rector”, which includes a selection of the public interventions he made during that mandate.
He is currently president of the Scientific Council of the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences at the same university.
Since 2020, he has been one of the three curators of the estate of José Mário Branco, whose treatment and study is being carried out at the Centro de Estudos de
Documentation José Mário Branco – Music and Freedom, created at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of Universidade Nova de Lisboa for this purpose.
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