Institute of Social Sciences – University of Lisbon (ICS-ULisboa)

Ricardo Roque is a historian and a Research Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences (ICS) of the University of Lisbon (https://www.ics.ulisboa.pt/en/pessoa/ricardo-roque). He received his PhD in History from the University of Cambridge in 2007, after studying sociology and historical sociology at NOVA University in Lisbon. Before he joined ICS, he held positions in the University of Azores, as an Assistant Professor in Sociology, and in Australia, as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Honorary Associate in History at University of Sydney. At ICS, Roque spearheaded the Research Group Empires, Colonialism, and Postcolonial Societies of which he was its lead researcher between 2013 and 2026. He is currently the Director of the Imprensa de Ciências Sociais (ICS Press), Portugal’s main university press in the social sciences and humanities and the PI of Ancient Portuguese Manuscripts in Timor-Leste, a project funded by the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme.

Roque is an East Timor scholar and works on the history and anthropology of human sciences and colonialism and their contemporary legacies. His research bridges imperial history, anthropology, and the global history of racial sciences, bringing ethnographic methods and social theory to bear on the understanding of colonial archives and collections in museums. He has published widely in both Portuguese and English on the history of imperialism, scientific racism, anthropology; colonial collections; archival ethnography; colonial mimesis; and the shared colonial history of Portugal and Timor-Leste.

Timor-Leste

Historical ethnography of colonial mimicry

Comparative studies of racial science and its biological collections

“Colonial Anthropological Missions” of the Portuguese imperial state (1936-1974)