At the end of the fifth and sixth editions of the Call to Scientific Employment Stimulus (CEEC), the IHC was awarded five new research contracts: two in the Junior Researcher category and three in the Assistant Researcher category, which will result in the return of three members to the Institute and the continuation of two others, with six-year contracts.

In the Junior Researcher category, Rubén Pérez, who had been our postdoctoral fellow, returns to continue his project studying constitutionalism and justice in 1930s Spain, when the Republic tried to implement a social and democratic constitutionalism. The project will touch on issues such as the struggle for control of public order between the army and republican reformism or the control of the use of communal goods between traditional and new institutions, such as town councils and municipal courts. He will maintain his lecturer position at the University of Granada, Spain.

Also as a Junior Researcher, and former post-doctoral fellow at the IHC, Miguel Carmo is continuing his study of the historical dynamics of major wildfires in Portugal after 1950. Having already worked on this topic in the context of the FIREUSES project, Miguel’s aim is to relate the fire uses to social tensions in agricultural and rural contexts, as well as to analyse the possible links between fire and the political economy of pulpwood plantations, without disregarding the potential role of climate change.

In the category of Assistant Researcher, we welcome back Rui Cidra, who will take us to the world of music and dance, with a project that aims to reflect on the relationship between citizenship and the expressive culture (sound, movement, voice and language) of African migrants and their descendants living in Portugal. The project’s main question is how do ‘these communities understand voice and language choice as tools to articulate social concerns related with daily migrant experiences and diasporic trajectories interconnecting African homelands and European states?’

Pedro Martins, also an Assistant Researcher, is leaving our science management team to return to full-time research work with a project on the uses of the medieval past in the construction of current identities, from a comparative perspective between Portugal and other European countries. More specifically, he questions how was the medieval past conceived in Portuguese society after 25 April, when the idea of the ‘Portuguese nation as possessing some sort of divine or civilizational mission’ supposedly gave way to a ‘conception seeking a more modern, postcolonial, European’ country? Crossing the concepts of medievalism and nationalism, as well as studying the importance of the medieval past in the construction of identities, Pedro will also look at the relationship between the depictions of the Middle Ages in Portuguese collective memory and those of other historical periods, such as the time of the ‘Discoveries’.

Finally, Giulia Strippoli is moving from a Junior Researcher to an Assistant Researcher contract with a research project on transnational women’s activism ‘on their own terms’. Giulia will focus on relations between women from Portugal, Angola, Guinea-Bissau ,and Mozambique during the Portuguese colonial wars and decolonisation, from the beginning of the armed conflict to the Third Women’s Conference in Nairobi. The project will use methodologies stemming from intersectional and transnational women’s studies, relying on a ‘post-colonial feminist methodology to critically discuss concepts like emancipation, sisterhood, motherhood, much debated in women’s and feminist groups, in past and present.’

Congratulations to all five!