The research group Empires, Colonialism and Post-Colonial Societies studies the historical dynamics and contemporary manifestations of the Portuguese imperial experience. It explores the rich and manifold cultural, social, political, and economic imprints of Portuguese imperial formations and colonial encounters, in the past and in the present, across time and space, with a privileged, though not exclusive, focus on the Portuguese-speaking world: Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Goa, Macau, Timor, San Tomé e Príncipe, Cape Verde, and Guinea Bissau. It thus aims at investigating transits, shifts, and connections between colonial and post-colonial, imperial and post-imperial, processes in different historical periods and geographical settings. It places the Portuguese case within a wide global setting both historically and historiographically, while seeking inclusive anthropological perspectives that articulate both European and Non-European agencies, cultures and historicities.

The research group privileges the study of 5 core themes:

• Government and power: political and economic rule; elites; urban governance; space and land rights; violence and conflict; critique of and resistance to colonial power;
•  Knowledge, science, and belief: forms of knowledge (colonial, indigenous, scientific); archives, exhibitions and museums; cultural encounters; religious conversion; appropriations of Christianity;
• Identity, difference and inclusion: dynamics of identity and difference; gender; law, justice and citizenship; racism and inequality in colonial/post-colonial contexts;
• Labor and exchanges: labor and slavery; diasporas and returnees; capital and labor; markets and exchange; nature, wealth and exploitation of environmental resources;
• Memory and legacies: expressions of remembering and forgetting colonial and imperial experiences; colonial memory in contemporary societies; indigenous historicities.