Maria Cecília de Miranda Nogueira Coelho

Maria Cecília de Miranda Nogueira Coelho is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil.  Before taking up her appointment, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow on the project “Dissa Erga: Emotions in Greek tragedy and in Classical Cinema.” She holds a PhD in Classics from the Universidade de São Paulo, with a dissertation on “Rhetoric and Philosophy in Euripides,” and while working on her PhD, she spent a year as a Visiting Researcher at Brown University. She also holds a Masters in Philosophy from the University of São Paulo with a dissertation on “Truth and Anti-Foundationalism in Gorgias,” and degrees in Mathematics and Philosophy from the Universidade de Brasilia.

Since her undergraduate studies she has had a keen interest in interdisciplinary subjects. The award-winning monograph that she submitted for her degree in Philosophy, which was published by University of Brasilia, was on logic and mathematics in Galileo.  In reading Galileo’s scientific texts, she could see the strong role of rhetoric in his writings and how the contemporary departmental boundaries between the humanities and the sciences conceal crucial connections between philosophical and scientific problems. Since then, she has tried to work in collaboration with scholars from other fields, in order to make her students (and herself) aware of these connections and to have a better understanding of the history of intellectual knowledge. She has been working on the status of sight and image in Plato, Demarcation between Rhetoric and Philosophy, as well as on the reception of classical subjects in Cinema and in the Sermons of the Jesuit António Vieira.

She was a Visiting Professor at King’s College, Universidad de Cádiz, Poznań University and Universidad de Mar del Plata, and former president of Sociedade Brasileira de Retórica (2010-12) and Associação Lationo-Americana de Retórica (2015-18). She has published papers on Greek Tragedy, Gorgias, Plato and Classics in Cinema and organized special issues in Brazilian academic journals. She is the editor of Retórica, Persuasão e Emoções (2018) and also co-edited Cinema: Lanterna Mágica da História e da Mitologia (2009), Ensaios sobre Literatura,Teatro e Cinema (2013),  Retórica e Análise do Discurso em diálogo (forthcoming in 2020) and Mito em Movimento: Recepção da Cultura Greco-Romana no Cinema (forthcoming in 2021).