In 1911, following the creation of the Humanities Course (Curso Superior de Letras, CSL) and the appointment of a teaching staff from scratch, the now Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos was invited to hold the chairs of Germanic and Portuguese Philology. She accepted, but immediately asked to be transferred to the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Coimbra (FLUC), arguing that the distance between her original post in Lisbon and her home was too great. Awarded a chair in Romance Philology, she thus became the first woman to hold the position of university professor in Portugal. Lições de Filologia Portuguesa (Lessons in Portuguese Philology, 1946) give us an idea of some of her classes, although she also taught German Language and Literature. When she later asked to retire, the pretext was more the many projects she was involved in than advancing age, and the truth is that she was still teaching when she died. We know of at least one student’s testimony of this final phase of her life (“À S.ª D.ª Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos”, Dra. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos…, 1926, pp.9-10).

The General Library of the University of Coimbra has part of the former professor’s personal books and papers in its collections, so, in addition to her manuscripts, we are also able to consult books containing her hand-written annotations.

Besides this work, which took up the last decade and a half of her life, Carolina maintained her links to a number of specialised European publications. Her first published text appeared in 1867, in the form of a short critical study on the Italian novelist Adolfo Mussafia in Archiv fuer das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, a Viennese journal to which she contributed assiduously for more than a decade. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, which Gustav Gröber edited from its foundation in 1877, is another journal whose name can be found in her bibliography until 1905, and was the first place in which she revealed herself to be a student of Camões. In order not to drag out this bibliographic listing of her intense work as a writer of articles, let us limit ourselves to saying that her name featured in journals as varied as Bulletin Hispanique, Jahrbuch fur romanische und englische Literatur, Literaturblatt fur germanische und romanische Philologie, Romania and Revue Hispanique (inter alia, Eine Berliner Romanistin in Portugal…). Here in Portugal there appeared the studies published in Revista Lusitana and Revista da Universidade de Coimbra. Of particular note is her role at Lusitânia: Revista de Estudos Portugueses (1924-27), of which she was the first editor. This was a project that was markedly linked to the idea of a nationalist renewal, and was supported by figures such as Agostinho de Campos, Jaime Cortesão, José de Figueiredo and Ricardo Jorge. The fact that such a position was given to a German woman makes both this group and the broad spectrum of “Lusism” it represented rather peculiar (História da História em Portugal séculos XIX-XX [History of History in Portugal – 19th/20th centuries], vol. I, 1998).

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