Biography

Elisa Scaraggi is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History at NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities in Lisbon. She obtained her PhD in Comparative Studies (2020) at the University of Lisbon, with a fellowship by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).

She is interested in how colonialism and coloniality shaped the political, social, and cultural context of nations that emerged from the dissolution of the Portuguese empire, with emphasis on Angola and Brazil. Her research addresses questions regarding the production of art and culture in violent and authoritarian environments, focusing on the entanglement between personal and collective experiences in personal archives, as well as in autobiographies, memoirs, and other pieces of life-writing.

Her current research focuses on Angolan nationalist Mário Pinto de Andrade’s personal archive as a key to uncover new narratives on Angola’s recent past and the relation between culture and nationalism.

Research fields

• Personal archives
• Angola
• Liberation struggles
• Decolonization

Selected publications

• Scaraggi, Elisa. “A Tiny Spark. History and Memory of the Angolan Anticolonial Struggle in José Luandino Vieira’s Papéis da prisão,” Luso-Brazilian Review 58 (2022): 54-80. [link]🔓
• Scaraggi, Elisa, Daniel Lourenço, Susana Araújo & Cristina Martínez Tejero. “Tracing the Contexts of Imprisonment: Perspectives on Incarceration between the Human and Social Sciences. An Introduction,” Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais 120 (2019): 107‑116. [link]🔓
• Scaraggi, Elisa, “Witness narratives in context: analysing the political prison writings of Graciliano Ramos and José Luandino Vieira,” in Context in Literary and Cultural Studies, edited by Jakob Ladegaard and Jakob Gaardbo Nielsen, 37–54. London: UCL Press, 2019. [link]🔓

Main projects

• Individual project “Implacable Archives: Reviving Mário Pinto de Andrade’s Personal Archive” — Hosted by the IHC and funded by the European Commission (Marie Sklowdowska Curie Actions, Individual Fellowship, Grant agreement ID 101062643). 2022-2024 [link]