Ricardo Roque is a Senior Research Fellow at Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon. He received his PhD in History from the University of Cambridge (2007) after studying sociology in Lisbon. Before becoming a researcher at ICS, he held postdoctoral positions at University of Azores, Portugal, and at the University of Sydney, Australia, to which he continues affiliated as Honorary Associate in the Department of History. At ICS-Lisbon he is the current group leader of the Research Group 'Empires, Colonialism, and Postcolonial Societies' (http://gi-imperios.org/blog/) and teaches in the Doctoral Programs in History and Anthropology.

Roque works on the history and anthropology of human sciences, colonialism, and cross-cultural contact in the Portuguese-speaking world, from 1800 to the present. His first book (Antropologia e Império, 2001) analyzed the colonial origins of physical anthropology in late imperial Goa and Portugal. His second book (Headhunting and Colonialism, 2010) explored headhunting, colonial violence, and the circulation of human skulls to anthropological museums in Europe, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. He has published widely in both Portuguese and English on the history of imperialism, racial sciences, and anthropological collections; the theory and ethnography of archives and colonial mimesis; and the colonial history of Timor-Leste. He has led several funded research projects in the history and anthropology of colonialism, indigenous cultures, and colonial sciences. Over the past years he has also been engaged in comparative studies of racial thought in the Global South; and on the history and ethnography of indigenous archives in the Portuguese colonial empire, as Chief Investigator of the INDICO-Indigenous Colonial Archives research project funded by FCT (www.indico.ics.ulisboa.pt). He is currently working on book projects that examine the history and legacies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century racial science collections and archives.

He has held visiting fellowships and professorships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Johns Hopkins University, and Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac. The University of Lisbon twice (2016, 2021) awarded his work the university's Scientific Prize in History and Philosophy.