Ricardo Roque is a historian and a Research Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences (ICS) of the University of Lisbon. He received his PhD in History from the University of Cambridge in 2007, after studying sociology and historical sociology at NOVA University in Lisbon. Before he joined ICS, he held positions in the University of Azores, as an Assistant Professor in sociology, and in Australia, as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Honorary Associate in History at University of Sydney. At ICS, Roque spearheaded the Research Group Empires, Colonialism, and Postcolonial Societies of which he was its lead researcher between 2013 and 2026. He is currently the Director of the Imprensa de Ciências Sociais (ICS Press), Portugal’s main university press in the social sciences and humanities and the PI of Ancient Portuguese Manuscripts in Timor-Leste, a project funded by the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme. He held visiting appointments in France (Musée du Quai Branly); Germany (MPI History of Science; MPI Legal History and Legal Theory); and the US (Johns Hopkins University). In Spring 2026, he will be a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Environmental Humanities and IKOS, University of Oslo, Norway, under a FCT Mobility Award.

Roque works on the history and anthropology of human sciences and colonialism and their contemporary legacies. His research bridges imperial history, anthropology, and the global history of racial sciences, bringing ethnographic methods and social theory to bear on the understanding of colonial archives and collections in museums. He has published widely in both Portuguese and English on the history of imperialism, scientific racism, anthropology; colonial collections of human remains; archival ethnography; colonial mimesis; and the shared colonial history of Portugal and Timor-Leste. He has been the PI of several projects on these topics, including a major FCT-funded project INDICO - Indigenous Colonial Archives. At present, Roque is working on a pair of book projects that will examine the history and legacies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century racial science in the context of Portuguese colonial expansionism. He also teaches regularly in the ICS-ULisboa Doctoral Programs in History and Anthropology, having supervised anthropology and history theses on colonial and post-colonial Portugal, Angola, Timor-Leste, and Guinea-Bissau. From 2026 he will serve as advisory editor of Isis and HoST and as co-director of the history of Portuguese anthropology theme at Bérose - Encyclopédie internationale des histoires de l'anthropologie.