Joana Gaspar de Freitas is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Literature and Tradition – Heritages, Arts, and Cultures (IELT) of Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She has a postdoctoral fellowship from the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT) and is a collaborative member of the History Center of the Universidade de Lisboa (CH-FLUL). She received her PhD in Contemporary History in 2011 from the Universidade de Lisboa with a thesis about the perceptions, uses, and consequences of human occupancy of the Portuguese coasts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She belongs to an interdisciplinary network of Portuguese-Brazilian researchers (BRASPOR) working on the margins of the Atlantic. Her research focuses on the environmental history of coastal zones in Portugal, Brazil, Angola, and Mozambique. She is interested in human/coastal environments interactions and their consequences, risks, and vulnerabilities; ecological traditional knowledge; tangible and intangible heritages; the transformation of landscapes; and integrated coastal zones management.