Filipe Carreira da Silva is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon. He is also Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge. A sociologist by training (ISCTE, 1998), he begins his career as a teaching assistant at the Department of Sociology of ISCTE. In 2003, he obtains a PhD from the University of Cambridge with a dissertation on classical sociological theory ("In Dialogue with Modern Times. The Social and Political Thought of G.H. Mead"). He then pursues his post-doctoral studies in the United States, first at the University of Harvard and later at the University of Chicago. In this latter University, he joins the Department of Sociology and begins working on two traditional lines of research of the first Chicago school of sociology, the city and a social theory of the self. After a two-year period at CES in Coimbra, he joins the ICS in April 2006. In 2016, he received the Habilitation degree in Sociology from the University of Lisbon.

His current research interests revolve around social and political theory. He presently runs the FCT-funded research project "Populus - Rethinking Populism" (2018-21). 

Filipe Carreira da Silva has written over 20 articles and 9 books on classical and contemporary sociological theories. These include Espaço Público em Habermas (Lisboa: ICS, 2002), Virtude e Democracia (Lisboa: ICS, 2004), G. H. Mead. A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), and Mead and Modernity. Science, Selfhood, and Democratic Politics (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008). This was awarded with the American Sociological Association Scholarly Book Award in History of Sociology (2010). His latest book is Sociology in Portugal: A Short History (2015, Palgrave-Macmillan).

He has served as referee for several international journals, including the American Journal of Sociology. He is the general editor of the "Theory Workshop: New Frontiers in Social and Political Theory" book series (Brill). His latest book, "The Politics of the Book", will be published by Penn State University Press in 2019. His most recent research project - POPULUS: Rethinking Populism - is funded by the FCT and revolves around the question of why there is no populism in Portugal.