Biography

Pedro Aires Oliveira is an Associate Professor with Habilitation in the Department of History at NOVA FCSH and a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History.

His main research interests are international history, Portuguese colonialism and decolonisation, on which he has published extensively in academic journals and books, including a monograph adapted from his doctoral thesis on the late British and Portuguese colonial period and decolonisation (Mário Soares Foundation Prize, 2007), and his contribution to the work História da expansão e do império Português [History of Portuguese Expansion and Empire] (2014).

He has experience in supervising master’s and doctoral students in various fields of 20th-century history and was the scientific curator of historical exhibitions on the cultural impact of the Great War (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2017) and the centenary of the League of Nations (National Library of Portugal, 2020), for which he coordinated the catalogue.

Since 2019, he has been a member of the Steering Committee of the Erasmus+ History in the Public Sphere master’s programme.

Research fields

• International history
• Colonialism and decolonization
• Portuguese foreign relations
• History of military conflicts

Selected publications

• Oliveira, Pedro Aires  & João Vieira Borges (Coords.). Crepúsculo do Império. Portugal e as guerras de descolonização. Lisbon: Bertrand, 2024. [link]
• Oliveira, Pedro Aires & Bruno Cardoso Reis. “The Power and Limits of Culture Myths in Portugal’s search for a post-imperial role,” The International History Review 40 (2018): 631-653. [link]
• Costa, João Paulo Oliveira e, José Damião Rodrigues & Pedro Aires Oliveira. História da expansão e do império Português. Lisbon: Esfera dos Livros, 2014. [link]
• Oliveira, Pedro Aires. “Live and Let Live: Britain and Portugal’s imperial endgame (1945-1975),” Portuguese Studies 29 (2013): 209-226. [link]
• Oliveira, Pedro Aires. Os Despojos da Aliança. A Grã-Bretanha e a questão colonial portuguesa, 1945-1975. Lisbon: Tinta da China, 2007. [link]

Main projects

• Co-coordinator, with Zélia Pereira, of the project ‘DecTiL — Auditing Decolonization in Timor-Leste, 1974-82: the Riscado Report’ — Hosted by the IHC and funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (2023.10636.25ABR). 2024-2026
• Researcher in the project “”Tell me how it was”: Public policies and child labor in Portugal and the Portuguese colonies” — Coordinated by Pedro Goulart (ISCSP-ULisboa) and funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (PTDC/IIM-ECO/5303/2014). 2014-2017 [link]
• Coordinator of the project “Memória Oral da Diplomacia Portuguesa” — Developed by the Associação dos Amigos do Arquivo Histórico-Diplomático do Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros, Instituto Diplomático and the Institute of Contemporary History, and funded by the Fundo para as Relações Internacionais do MNE. 2012- [link]