Profile

MARIA HELENA DA CRUZ COELHO is full professor retired from the University of Coimbra. She is member of several Academies and Commissions in Portugal (Academy of History, Navy Academy, Academy of Sciences) and abroad (Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions, Commission Internationale de Diplomatique). She belongs to the Scientific Council of various national and international Journals in Portugal, Spain and Brazil. She is an Integrated Researcher at the Centre for History of Society and Culture and Collaborator in other I&D Units and she participates in several international research projects, some of them funded by FCT. She is member of the Editorial Board of the Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda and has been a member of the General Council of the University of Coimbra and the Commission for External Evaluation of the History of Portuguese Universities. She also was in several assessment panels on History and Archaeology, for the Portuguese Agency for the Assessment and Accreditation of Higher Education (A3ES) and the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). She has participated in over seven hundred scientific meetings in Portugal and abroad (Spain, France, Italy, England, Scotland, Belgium, Austria, Germany, Greece, Czech Republic, Norway, former USSR, USA, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Morocco, Cape Verde), and has published more than three hundred studies in several languages. Her research interests focus on several themes of the Middle Ages, with emphasis on paleography and diplomatics, political, religious, institutional, economic and social history, royal and local power, biography, the rural world, food, daily life, and medieval historiography. She received eight prizes of the Portuguese Academy of History and the Science Prize of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (1990). She was honored by de President of the Republic with the Degree of Great Official of the Order of Infante D. Henrique (2011).