Miguel Dantas da Cruz, historian, is a research fellow at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa. He has been in ICS-UL since 2014, first as a postdoctoral researcher, and then as a research fellow. In December 2022, he was hired (with tenure) as a research fellow in the same institution under the institutional CEEC program.

After an eight-year-long career in the private sector and the military, he returned to the university in 2002, and earned his degree in History from ISCTE-IUL, in 2006. In 2008, he received his Master’s degree in History, Defense, and International Relations. His dissertation, on the history of early modern political economy, focused on Portuguese neutrality in times of revolution (1792-1815) and on Portugal’s foreign trade with North Atlantic states (including the USA and the Scandinavian countries). In 2013, he completed his PhD in History, also in ISCTE-IUL. His thesis, entitled “O Conselho Ultramarino e a administração militar do Brasil,” revisits one of the more important institutions in the Portuguese overseas empire. The research was subsequently published in several articles or essays and in a book entitled “An Empire of Conflicts. The Overseas Council and the defense of Brazil.”  

During his postdoctoral research, he explored the dynamics of circulation in the Portuguese empire (especially of mid-17th century soldiers), which he linked with developments in the Portuguese imperial culture. He published several texts that relate perceptions of empire with martial imagery, and that show how the crusading ideals of the early expansion were transformed by the Iberian Union and the fight against Protestants.

Since 2018 he has developed a special interest in the petitionary movements of the early 1800s, which was consolidated by his involvement in the Project RESISTANCE: Rebellion and Resistance in the Iberian Empires. The contradictions of the first Portuguese liberal thought and the adaptation of Portuguese society to the ecumenical Liberalism of the early 1800s are another area of work. He has been investigating the disappearance of commercial corporations and the remaking of retail circuits in the Portuguese world during the revolutionary context; a research path that also led him to explore the retail and consumer revolutions, fashion and material culture, and the new appearances of respectability of the 19th-century middle class.   

The projects he has been developing and participating cover various topics: diversity of Indigenous and academic expertise, current global crises, climate change, loss of biocultural diversity, and rise in xenophobic nationalism (EDGES: Entangling Indigenous Knowledges in Universities); resistance of subordinated social categories in the Iberian empires (RESISTANCE: Rebellion and Resistance in the Iberian Empires, 16th-19th centuries); the role of public rituals in the Portuguese empire, and beyond (RITUALS - Public Rituals in the Portuguese Empire, 1498-1822); appropriation, representation and delimitation of the territory in the Portuguese empire (TERRAS LUSAS: Territorialidade e Conflito no Império Português de Setecentos); common men’s relationship with culture, time and language through the study of lost letters (CARDS: Cartas Desconhecidas).