Ricardo Roque is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon. Currently he is also a Honorary Associate in the Department of History, University of Sydney, as part of the Race and Ethnicity in the Global South Laureate Program (REGS). He has received training in Sociology (BA Hons, MA, New University of Lisbon) and in History (PhD, University of Cambridge). His research combines imperial and postcolonial studies, social and cultural anthropology, and history and sociology of science. He has been working on the connections between human sciences, colonialism and indigenous cultures in the nineteenth and twentieth century in the late Portuguese empire, with a special focus on East Timor, Goa, and Angola.

For the current project, he is focusing on topics, agents and projects associated with the history of race and physical anthropology in Timor. He is also conducting an in-depth study of the colonial ethnographies and surveys produced by military officers, governors and missionaries, in connection with the Timorese usos e costumes (manners and customs), and the colonial study of customary law.

Selected publications:
Books

• 2012 (editor, with K. Wagner) Engaging Colonial Knowledge: Reading European Archives in World History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
• 2010 Headhunting and Colonialism: Anthropology and the Circulation of Human Skulls in the Portuguese Empire, 1870-1930. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
• 2008 (editor, with João Arriscado Nunes), Objectos Impuros: Experiências em Estudos Sobre a Ciência. Porto: Edições Afrontamento.
• 2001 Antropologia e Império: Fonseca Cardoso e a Expedição à Índia em 1895. Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais.

Recent articles

• 2012 ‘Mountains and black races: anthropology’s heterotopias in colonial East Timor’. The Journal of Pacific History, 12, in press.
• 2012 ‘Marriage traps: colonial interactions with indigenous marriage ties in East Timor’, in Francisco Bethencourt and Adrian Pearce (eds.), Racism and Ethnic Relations in the Portuguese-Speaking World. London: British Academy, in press.
• 2011 ‘Stories, skulls, and colonial collections’. Configurations, 19: 1-23.
• 2011 ‘Os portugueses e os reinos de Timor no século XIX/The Portuguese and the kingdoms of Timor during the nineteenth century‘,Oriente, 20:91-111. [bilingual edition]
• 2010 The unruly island: colonialism’s predicament in late nineteenth-century East Timor. Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, 17/18: 303-330.