Sofia Aboim is Research Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon  (since 23 April 2026). She holds a PhD in Sociology from Iscte – University Institute of Lisbon (2004) and obtained her Habilitation in Sociology in 2023. At ICS-ULisboa, she led the LIFE Research Group and served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Análise Social between 2021 and 2026.

Sofia’s research is situated at the intersection of the sociology of gender, feminist theories, critical studies of masculinities, and the analysis of social inequalities. She has worked on gender, sexualities, sexual and gender rights, masculinities, migration, race and ethnicity, privileging intersectional, comparative and transnational approaches. Drawing on her research on trans identities and trajectories, she has developed an understanding of gender as a relational field, shaped by struggles over recognition, normative regimes, forms of social classification, and embodied inequalities. More recently, her work has focused on postcolonial formations, the legacies of empire, processes of racialisation, South-South migrations, racial capitalism, and sensory and embodied regimes of power, labour and resistance.

She has coordinated and participated in several national and international research projects. These include TRANSRIGHTS: Gender Citizenship and Sexual Rights in Europe, funded by the European Research Council (ERC Consolidator Grant no. 615594), which compared regimes of gender citizenship and sexual rights in five European countries. She also led Race Trouble: Decolonizing Race and Racial Inequality in Postcolonial Portugal, funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), which examined the situated meanings of racial and ethnic categories and experiences of discrimination in postcolonial Portugal. She currently coordinates the Portuguese team of the European project UNITE: University Network for Inclusive and Digital Education (Erasmus consortium, 2023–2027), focused on the inclusion of students in vulnerable situations in higher education.

She teaches in several doctoral programmes at ICS and the University of Lisbon. She currently teaches in the Interuniversity PhD Programme in Sociology: Knowledge for Open and Inclusive Societies (OpenSoc) and in the PhD Programme in Gender Studies (NOVA FCSH/NOVA School of Law, ISCSP-University of Lisbon). She is also an invited professor at the Department of Sociology of Iscte – University Institute of Lisbon. She has been a visiting researcher and invited lecturer at the University of Lausanne, Eduardo Mondlane University, Tallinn University, and the Gender Excellence Centre (GEXcel) at Linköping University, Sweden. Since 2018, she has been a regular member of European Research Council evaluation panels.

Her publications include key books on gender and masculinities, such as Plural Masculinities: The Remaking of the Self in Private Life (Routledge, 2016), as well as recent publications that extend this agenda to the study of trans identities, postcolonial formations, racialisation, migration and sensory regimes. These include Gender Fields: The Social Organization of Gender Identity (with Pedro Vasconcelos; Routledge, 2025); Colonial Senses: Colonial Sensorial Regimes and Anti-Colonial Resistance (with Filipe Carreira da Silva; Cambridge University Press, 2026); Political Modernity and Beyond: Crisis, Struggles and Reconfigurations (co-edited with José Maurício Domingues and Filipe Carreira da Silva; Routledge, 2025); and Men and Masculinities at the Margins: Decolonial and Intersectional Approaches (co-edited with Ernesto Vasquez del Aguila and Jeff Hearn; Routledge, forthcoming). She has also recently published the articles “Liminal Transitions: Rethinking Transgender Journeys over Time” (with Sara Merlini; Current Sociology, 2025), “Descolonizar: reimaginar a ordem do sensível no Portugal pós-colonial” (Análise Social, 2025), and “From Mineworkers to Subaltern Entrepreneurs: Masculinity and Racial Capitalism Across the Mozambique-South Africa Border” (Gender, Place & Culture, 2026).

Further information is available through her CIÊNCIAVITAE, ORCID and Google Scholar profiles.