Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia is the coordinator of the bilingual project Terminological Dictionary on Postcolonial Literary Theory. She holds a doctoral degree in Literature in English by the University of Aveiro (2005) and a MA in English Studies (1999). She has conducted interdisciplinary research in the fields of visual, gender and postcolonial studies, including on South Asian, African, British and Luso-American authors. She has published extensively in domestic and international journals and is the author of the book Postcolonial and Feminist Grotesque: Texts of Contemporary Excess (Peter Lang AG, 2011). Recently, she co-edited the collection of essays Intercultural Crossings: Conflict, Memory, Identity (Peter Lang AG, 2012). In 2011-2012 she was Auxiliary Professor at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the New University of Lisbon where she taught Translation Studies at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. She also taught English at the University of Aveiro.

Her research interests include Teaching English (TEFL); Terminology and translation of postcolonial theory; Language policy and planning; Contemporary literature/s; New literature/s in English; Comparative Studies: Literary/Literary, Literary/Filmic, Literary/Pictorial; Postcolonial theory and fiction in Portuguese and English; Feminist theory and fiction about women; Gender Studies; Intercultural Studies; Postcolonial ecocriticism and zoocriticism; Film Studies; Trauma, Gothic, Abjection Studies; The poetics of the Grotesque: representation, aesthetics and politics; Translation Studies: Sciences and Culture; and Cultural markets and the literary industry: the production of meanings, construction of difference, politics, economics and globalisation. Many of these interests are combined and realised in the activities of the international project she is part of, The production, circulation and reception of the markers of ‘difference’ in global(ised) cultural markets. The project is based in the University of Vigo, Spain, and their members are researchers from several European universities, Australia and the New States.