About
Julieta Almeida Rodrigues became a multi award-winning author with her debut novel, Eleonora and Joseph. Passion, Tragedy, and Revolution in the Age of Enlightenment (New Academia Publishing). Besides being a Book Excellence Award Nominee in the Europe category 2024, she is also the Fiction Winner of the Literary Titan Gold Book Award December, 2023, the Historical Fiction Winner, Maincrest Media Book Award, 2023, and the Fiction Winner, Hollywood Book Festival, 2023. In 2022, she won the Grand Prize, Goethe Awards for Late Historical Fiction, which recognizes emerging new talent and outstanding works in Post-1750s Historical Fiction. Among others, Eleonora and Joseph has been highly praised by Kirkus Reviews and Publisher's Weekly. Born and raised in Portugal, Rodrigues earned a PhD at Columbia University, where the renowned Margaret Mead was her dissertation sponsor. Rodrigues is the author of two collections of short fiction, The Rogue and Other Portuguese Stories and On the Way to Red Square (both also by New Academia Publishing). The latter is a fictionalized account of her life in the diplomatic circles of Moscow in the 1980s. She also published a narrative work about Sintra, Portugal, titled Hora Crepuscular/Drawing Dusk/La Hora Crepuscular (Agir, Execução Gráfica). She is a member of the Pen Club of Portugal and the Fulbright Commission Team of Evaluators in Portugal (2014 Prize for International Cooperation, the Prince of Asturias Foundation). She has taught at the University of Lisbon and at Georgetown University, and has been a Visiting Scholar at the New School (twice). She has spoken at the Foreign Service Institute, U.S. Department of State, The Chawton House Library in the United Kingdom, The International Conference on the Short Story, The American Portuguese Studies Association, the Historical Writers of America, and The Chanticleer International Conference, among other institutions and cultural societies. Rodrigues is a member of the Steering Committee of the Historical Novel Society New York City Chapter and co-managed its Guest Speaker Program at the Jefferson Market Library from 2016 to 2020. Recently, she joined The Society of Authors in the United Kingdom. She divides her time between Portugal and the United States.
Featured Work
Eleonora and Joseph: Passion, Tragedy, and Revolution in the Age of Enlightenment
The novel opens with the aristocratic Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel pleading the High Court of Naples to be beheaded instead of hanged like a criminal. A main revolutionary of her time, Eleonora helps to establish the Neapolitan Republic, modeled on the French Revolution. Imprisoned in 1799 after the return of the Bourbon Monarchy, and while waiting to be sentenced, she writes a memoir about the adolescent lover who abandoned her, Joseph Correia da Serra. While visiting Monticello many years later, Joseph accidentally finds Eleonora's manuscript in Thomas Jefferson's library. Now retired, Jefferson is committed to founding the University of Virginia and entices Correia with a position when the institution opens. As their friendship grows deeper, the two men share many intimate secrets. The novel is told from Eleonora and Joseph's alternating points of view. The two interwoven first-person narratives share many scenes. The story follows the characters from the elegant salons of Naples to the halls of Monticello, from the streets of European capitals such as Lisbon, London and Paris to the cultured Philadelphia and the chic soirées in Washington, DC. Eleonora and Joseph are both prominent figures of the Southern European Enlightenment. Together with Thomas Jefferson, they are part of The Republic of Letters, a network of thinkers who radically influenced the intellectual world in which they lived.
Other Works
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Hora Crepuscular/Drawing Dusk/La Hora Crepuscular
2014
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The Rogue and Other Portuguese Stories
2014
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On the Way to Red Square
2006
Awards and Recognition
- Who’s Who in the Portuguese Communities (Quem é Quem nas Comunidades Portuguesas). Lisbon: Editorial Negócios, 1989.
- Grand Prize Winner, The Goethe Book Awards 2022 - Chanticleer International Book Awards. The Goethe Book Awards Recognize Emerging New Talent and Outstanding Works in Post-1750s Historical Fiction.
- Fiction Winner, Hollywood Book Festival, 2023
