João Vasconcelos is a research fellow at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa, where he received his doctoral degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology in 2007. He graduated in Social Anthropology from the Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa in 1990 and completed a master’s degree in Social Sciences at the ICS in 1998. Between 1995 and 1998, he was a teaching assistant in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Coimbra.

He worked on Catholic pilgrimages and local religion in Portugal, on the patrimonialization and folklorization of peasant culture in the 20^th century, and on the history of Christian Rationalist spiritualism in Brazil and Cape Verde. He is the author of Romarias: Um Inventário dos Santuários de Portugal (2 vols., 1996 and 1998), and Histórias do Racionalismo Cristão em São Vicente, de 1911 a 1940 (revised 2^nd edition, 2012).

Between 2007 and 2012, he directed the ICS Master’s programme in Social and Cultural Anthropology, in the first three years with Susana de Matos Viegas. Between January 2014 and July 2023, he directed the PhD in Anthropology at the University of Lisbon, a joint programme between ICS and ISCSP with collaboration of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities since July 2015.

He was a member of the ICS Pedagogical Council from November 2011 to July 2018, and president of this body from July 2018 to March 2024. He was also president of the ICS Postgraduate Studies Committee from July 2018 to December 2023.

His current research focuses on religion, on processes of categorization and formation of collective identities, and on Cape Verdean labour migration, particularly in the late colonial period, combining approaches from anthropology and history.