Filipe Carreira da Silva is an Assistant Research Professor at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa and a Fellow at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge. Since 2012-2013 he has been a visiting professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, and for 2023-24 at ISCTE-IUL. He is also the coordinator of the Opensoc inter-university PhD programme in Sociology at the ICS (2023-).

After graduating in Sociology from ISCTE in 1998, Filipe Carreira da Silva obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 2003. His dissertation focused on classical sociological theory and the works of G. H. Mead. His postdoctoral studies took him to Harvard University and the University of Chicago. He has also been a visiting scholar at the Van Leer Institute of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. He received his habilitation in sociology from the University of Lisbon in 2016, which led to the book The Politics of the Book in 2019.

His research has made significant contributions to pragmatic sociology, exploring a wide range of topics from critical theory to the politics of populism. His most recent works include Democratic Resentment and Humanism and Empire. The issue of inclusion/exclusion runs through both books. In Democratic Resentment, forthcoming from Oxford University Press, he uncovers the often unstable inclusion of racialised groups in populist narratives and reveals the deep-seated colonial dimension of political modernity. Building on these insights, his next book, Humanism and Empire, extends the discussion to the broader field of humanism. Here he explores how the political construction of 'the people' is intertwined with notions of who is considered human, focusing on anti-colonial critiques in redefining humanity against colonial frameworks. The two works share an underlying concern to link the emotional dynamics of politics to broader questions of inclusion, identity and power in a global context.

Filipe Carreira da Silva is the author of 9 monographs and has edited several books and journal issues, including key works on G.H. Mead. He has published over 40 articles in peer-reviewed journals worldwide.

Since 2003, he has coordinated eight research projects supported by various funding bodies.

Between 2017 and 2022, he coordinated the project Rethinking Populism (PDTC/SOC-SOC/28524/2017), which will be published as the book Democratic Resentment. A Global History of Populism from the American Populists to the Present Day (Oxford University Press, 2025). 

His current projects include 'Decolonising Humanism', funded by the British Academy, and the exploratory project FCT Race Trouble (2023-25), coordinated by Sofia Aboim. This project will be published as a book - Colonial Senses. Colonial Sensorial Regimes and the Anti-Colonial Resistance - by Cambridge University Press (2025).

Successfully completed PhDs:

Pedro Pereira Neto, “Ambientalismo e Comunicação Política” (2012)

António Baptista, “Isocracy – A Theory of Democracy” (2013)

Pedro Miguel Martins Mendonça, “Democracy, Populism, and Economic Globalization — An extension of the selectorate theory” (2018)

Julius Maximilian Rogenhofer, “Decisiveness and Fear of Disorder. Rethinking Germany’s response to irregular migration” (2021), to be published by Michigan University Press, 2024.

Daniel Davison-Vecchione, “On the Genealogy of Action: Conceptions of the Self in Max Weber and Georg Simmel” (2022)

Joe P.L. Davidson, “Jumpstart: Utopia in the Aftermath of Progress” (2022), to be published by MIT Press, 2025. 

Maria João Taborda. “Valores e Cinema” (2022)

Abdullah Awad, “Adorno, Aesthetics, and Critical Theory Beyond Europe.” (2022)

Sebastian Raza-Mejia, “Agents in Crisis: Theoretical Studies on Agency, Meaning and Time” (2023)

Iris Pissaride, "Cyprus in the British Empire’s Time and Space: Documents, Objects, and Colonial Practices of Knowledge Production." (2023)