Ricardo Roque is a 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 and historical sociology in Lisbon (BA, MA, Nova University of Lisbon). He was a Postdoctoral Fellow (2012-13) and is now an Honorary Associate in the Department of History of the University of Sydney. At Lisbon he now heads 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 twentieth-century. His first book (Antropologia e Império, 2001) analyzed the colonial origins of physical anthropology in late imperial Goa. 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.

Over the past four years he has been engaged in the historical ethnography of colonial mimesis and in comparative studies of racial thought and colonial collections. Drawing on this research, Roque is currently working on two book projects. The first is a monograph that explores the connected histories of anthropometry and racial theory in Portugal and its colonial empire between 1880 and 1945. The second is a history of the so-called ‘Colonial Anthropological Missions’ to Portuguese Africa and Asia, from their origins in the 1930s to their legacies in the present. A result of this research are also the volumes Luso-tropicalism and Its Discontents (co-edited with Warwick Anderson and Ricardo Ventura Santos), a critical comparative history of luso-tropicalist claims; and Crossing Histories and Ethnographies (co-edited with Elizabeth Traube), a historical anthropology of colonial historicities in Timor-Leste, both published by Berghahn in 2019. Current research includes also a Portuguese Research Council (FCT) funded project entitled, Indigenous Colonial Archives: Micro-histories and Comparisons.

Roque’s research has been funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, the University of Cambridge (Smuts Memorial Fund and Darwin College), the Orient Foundation, and the Australian Research Council.

He was a Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (2012), Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of History of the Johns Hopkins University (2018), and Visiting Professor at the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac (2019).