Vassallo de Lopes, Maria Immacolata

Maria Immacolata Vassallo de Lopes (Italy, 1945) is professor at the School of Communication at the University of São Paulo (Brazil). She is considered to be one of the main female referents in communication research in Latin America.

She is an expert in communication theories and methodologies, as well as in audience and reception studies. Since the first years of her career, she has reclaimed popular culture analysis: first through her investigations on radio during the 80s and, after that, through soap operas as relevant cultural narratives. She has focused on studying fictional television and Brazilian telenovelas as an international cultural phenomenon. One of her main publications on this topic is the book Vivendo com a telenovela: mediações, recepção, teleficcionalidade (2002).
Vassallo de Lopes is the general coordinator of the Iberoamerican Observatory for Television Fiction (OBITEL), an initiative that analyzes production, reception, and sociocultural repercussion of Latin American, Spanish and Portuguese television fiction. She is the director of the Brazilian scientific journal MatrizES. She has received important awards such as the Research Fellow from the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico in Brazil. Her interest in developing and studying theories and methodologies makes her one of the main figures in the field of Latin American communication research.

Selected publications:

• Vassallo de Lopes, M.I. (1990). Pesquisa em Comunicação. Loyola.
• Vassallo de Lopes, M.I. (1999). La investigación en comunicación: cuestiones epistemológicas, teóricas y metodológicas. Diálogos de la Comunicación, 10(56), 13-27.
• Vassallo de Lopes, M.I. (2014). Mediação e recepção. Algumas conexões teóricas e metodológicas nos estudos latino-americanos de comunicação. MATRIZes, 8(1), 65-80.
• Vassallo de Lopes, M.I. (2018). The Barberian theory of communication. MATRIZes, 12(1), 39-63.