Born in Manhattan, NY, and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Michael Ferreira received his doctoral degree in Hispanic Philology and Linguistics (2001) and his M.A. in Luso-Brazilian Literature (1994) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2004, The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded Dr. Ferreira and Dr. Mark Davies (Brigham Young University) a two-year Division of Preservation and Access grant to create a fully-searchable, web-based, 45-million-word database of electronic texts in Portuguese. The Corpus do português project spans 700 years of Portuguese language and was made available free of charge in September of 2006 on the internet at www.corpusdoportugues.org. His doctoral dissertation, A Lexicon of Selected Works Printed by Valentim Fernandes (1496-1502), is an exhaustive compilation of the vocabulary contained in five turn-of-the-fifteenth-century texts which served as a pilot project for the Dictionary of the Old Portuguese Language. His main areas of expertise are Lexicography, Textual Edition, and Paleography. He is the Co-author of 501 Portuguese Verbs (Hauppauge, N.Y.: Barron's Educational Series, Inc., 2005), now in its second edition, and Editor of the Portuguese Series at the Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies in New York. Author of The Text and Concordances of The Portuguese Version of The Book of Marco Polo (1502), Dr. Ferreira has edited and transcribed several Old and Early Portuguese texts, and currently is the director of the Dictionary of the Old Portuguese Language Project. In the classroom, he specializes in the application of computer techniques to philology, having taught workshops in Portugal and Brazil on paleography, electronic transcription and edition of Old Portuguese texts, as well as computer-based lexicography techniques.