Five new research contracts were awarded to the IHC, within the scope of the third edition of the Call to Scientific Employment Stimulus promoted by the FCT. Four in the Junior Researcher category and one in the Principal Researcher category, which will result in the integration of four new PhDs in the Institute’s research team and in the beginning of five new projects in very diverse topics.

The new Principal Researcher is Victor Pereira, PhD in History from Sciences Po at Paris, who will return to the IHC (and Portugal) after a career at the University of Pau et des Pays de l’Adour. Having developed research on Portuguese, Spanish and French emigration, it is now proposing to develop a comparative history project on Portuguese shopkeepers in Rio de Janeiro, Kinshasa, and Paris.

In the Junior category, the IHC will host four young researchers, two of whom will join the Institute for the first time. Returning to the IHC is Hélia Marçal, PhD in Conservation and Restoration by FCT NOVA and who had already collaborated with the Institute as a science manager. Her project focuses on the performing arts and their “ecologies of memory”, with the objective of studying during and after the dictatorship. It will be the first in-depth study on the structures of performance art production and preservation in Portugal.

For her part, Catarina Laranjeiro, who joined IHC in 2019 after obtaining a PhD in Post-Colonialism and Global Citizenship at the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra, will focus on the relationship between the colonial legacy of images and the production of popular cinema on the African continent, bringing this debate to the Portuguese post-colonial context.

Maria do Mar Gago received a PhD in History from the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon and will now join the IHC to continue her research on the importance of the cultivation of robusta coffee in defining the nature of Portuguese colonialism, posing a new question for analysis: how did coffee and scientists contribute to imagine new political relations at the global scale?

Finally, the IHC will host Arturo Zoffman Rodriguez, who received his PhD from the European University Institute and is currently a fellow at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. His labour history project is both comparative and transnational. The object of study will be the Sindicatos Libres of Barcelona, a far-right and conservative trade union, and its relationship with the rise of fascisms in Spain, Italy, Portugal and France.

Images: (01) 1898, A Torre Eiffel, rua do Ouvidor 77 e 79, Rio de Janeiro (Source: Gallica, BNF); (02) Festa da Juventude. Danças da URSS. Canto Livre. Baile. União da Juventude Comunista. Mário Soares Foundation (Source: Casa Comum); (03) 1970, Luís Cabral duting the shooting of the film “Des fusils pour Banta” by Sarah Maldoror. Mário Soares Foundation (Source: Casa Comum); (04) Coffee. São Tomé e Príncipe Historical Archive (Source: Casa Comum); (05) Cover of the newspaper Unión Obrera (Source: Wikimedia Commons)