| Cleonice Berardinelli | |
 | |
| Centenarian |
Cleonice Seroa da Motta Berardinelli [Portuguese: Serôa] ( 28 August 1916-31 January 2023) was a Brazilian centenarian and academic.
Biography[]
Cleonice Berardinelli was born in Rio de Janeiro City, Rio de Janeiro State, Brazil on 28 August 1916. Her parents were Emidio Seroa da Motta and Rosina Coutinho Seroa da Motta. Her father was in the Army and was frequently transferred around the country. As a result, she lived in many parts of Brazil, including in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. In Rio, she studied at the National Institute of Music, under the guidance of Oscar Lorenzo Fernandez, who was also her piano teacher. She interrupted her studies to move to Sao Paulo, where she finished her secondary school. She attended the University of Sao Paulo, where she studied literature under Fidelino de Figueiredo, among others. She graduated in 1938.
Berardinelli completed a PhD at the University of Brazil (1959); her doctoral thesis on Fernando Pessoa was the first such thesis on the Portuguese poet to be written in Brazil. She became Full Professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 1944, and was made Professor Emerita in 1987. She was also Full Professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in 1963), and made Emerita there in 2006. In addition, she taught at the Catholic University of Petropolis, the Rio Branco Institute, the University of California Santa Barbara, etc.
She is the sixth occupant of chair number 8 at the Brazilian Academy of Letters, to which she elected on 16 December 2009, in succession to Antonio Olinto. She was received on 5 April 2010, by academician Affonso Arinos de Mello Franco.
She became the the longest-serving member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, after the death of 102-year-old Evaristo Moraes Filho on 22 July 2016.
She died in Rio de Janeiro on 31 January 2023 aged 106.
References[]
- Cleonice Berardinelli Academia Brasileira de Letras
- ABL elege professora Cleonice Berardinelli para a cadeira número 8 Folha Online, 16 December 2009
- 105 anos de Cleonice Berardinelli, hoje! O Meu Pessoa (Facebook), 28 August 2021
- https://g1.globo.com/rj/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2023/01/31/escritora-cleonice-berardinelli-membro-da-abl-morre.ghtml