Mércia Santana Flannery, PhD, is the Director of the Portuguese Language Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She has a PhD in Linguistics, with a specialization in Sociolinguistics (Narrative Analysis, Discourse Analysis), from Georgetown University. She also has a degree in Letras (Literature, Portuguese and English), and a Master's in Linguistics, from Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil. She has conducted research on Brazilian narratives of racial discrimination, discriminatory discourse, narrative and identity, and the teaching of Portuguese as a foreign language. Her book is entitled “Uma introdução à análise da narrativa oral”, and her current research focuses on discriminatory discourse in social media, including online news forums and Facebook in Brazil, and Portuguese as a foreign language. At Penn, she has taught a variety of courses at all levels of Portuguese, and advanced level courses on Luso-Brazilian Culture and Brazilian Cinema. In addition, she has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in Middlebury College Portuguese Summer School, Middlebury, Vermont. She is ACTFL OPI/IRL and OPIc certified.
