Elsa Peralta
elsa.peralta@campus.ul.ptProject Legacies of Empire and Colonialism in Comparative Perspective - CITCOM
Ciência ID BC1D-4AAE-1E4F
Elsa Peralta holds a PhD in Anthropology (University of Lisbon, 2006). She is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Comparative Studies (CEComp) of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon and an Associate Researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences (ICS), also of the University of Lisbon, Portugal. She was assistant (2000-2006) and assistant professor (2006-2009) at ISCSP-UTL and invited assistant professor at FCSH-UNL, Portugal (2012). Between 2009 and 2015 she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences (ICS-UL), Portugal, with a research project on the memory and forgetting of the Portuguese colonial empire in post-colonial Portugal, and between 2009 and 2011 she was an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester. During the Spring semester 2019, she was FLAD / Michael Teague Visiting Professor in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University, USA. At the moment, she coordinates the advanced cycle of Ethnography Workshops at ICS-UL, is a member of the scientific committee of the PhD in Anthropology of the University of Lisbon (DANT-UL: ICS/ISCSP/FLUL) and a member of the FCT evaluation board. In CEComp she is the coordinator of the Research Group CITCOM (Citizenship, Critical Cosmopolitanism, Modernity/ies, (Post)Colonialism) and she also coordinates the Research Line Legacies of Empire and Colonialism in Comparative Perspective.
Her work draws on crossing perspectives from anthropology, memory studies and postcolonial studies and focuses on the intersection between private and public modes of remembering past events, in particular the colonial past. She was the PI of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) funded project Narratives of loss, war and trauma: Portuguese cultural memory and the end of empire and the co-PI of the FCT project Portuguese Colonial Empire and Urban Popular Culture: Comparing Visions from the Metropolis and the Colonies. At the present moment she is the PI of the FCT funded project Constellations of Memory: a multidirectional study of postcolonial migration and remembering (PTDC/SOC-ANT/4292/2021) and is a Management Committee Member of the COST Action research network, HIDDEN. Her works include several articles, chapters and books. Her most recent books are Retornar: Traços de Memória do Fim do Império (Edições 70, 2017) (ed.com Bruno Góis e Joana Oliveira), Lisboa e Memória do Império: Património, Museus e Espaço Público (Deriva, 2017), The Retornados From Portuguese Colonies in Africa: Narrative, Memory, and History (Routledge, 2022) and Legacies of The Portuguese Colonial Empire: Nationalism, Multiculturalism and Citizenship Bloomsbury, Forthcoming 2023) (ed. com Nuno Domingos). In addition, she was the curator and scientific coordinator of the Exhibition Return: Traces of Memory produced by EGEAC in 2015.
Areas of research
Social and Cultural Memory
Museums and Material Culture
Colonialism and Post-colonialism
Portugal and Portuguese Empire
Narrative, Life Histories and Biographies
Selected publications
Peralta, E. (ed.) (2022), The Retornados From Portuguese Colonies in Africa: Narrative, Memory, and History. London and New York: Routledge.
Peralta, E. (2022). “The return from Africa: Illegitimacy, concealment, and the non-memory of Portugal’s imperial collapse”. Memory Studies, 15 (1): 52-69.
Peralta, E. (2022). “The Memorialization of Empire in Postcolonial Portugal: Identity Politics and the Commodification of History”, Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, Special Issue Heritages of Portuguese Influence: Histories, Spaces, Texts, and Objects, ed. M. Bandeira Jerónimo, A. M. Klobucka, & W. Rossa, 36-37: 156-179.
Peralta, E; M. Delaunay & B. Góis (2022). “Portuguese (Post-)Imperial Migrations: Race, Citizenship, and Labour”, Journal of Migration History 8: 404–431.
Peralta, E. & N. Domingos (2019). “Lisbon: reading the (post-)colonial city from the nineteenth to the twenty- first century”, Urban History, 46 (2): 246-265.
Peralta, E. (2017), Lisboa e a Memória do Império: Património, Museus e Espaço Público, Lisbon: Deriva/Le Monde Diplomatic.
Peralta, E., Góis, B. & Oliveira, J. (eds.) (2017), Retornar: Traços de Memória do Fim do Império. Lisbon: Edições 70.
