My research interests revolve around the relationship between people and state in historical perspective. I am interested in how collective action builds, transforms and constrains states, but also in how the actions of the state can shape the political values and forms of action of popular movements. As an historian, the challenge that drives me is to explore social change across societies and cultures in ways that incorporate agency, contingency and the complexity of human relations.

My first book, Lisbon Rising: Urban Social Movements in the Portuguese Revolution, 1974-1975, to be published in late 2012 by the University of Manchester Press, argues that the political mobilisation, commitment and choices of the urban poor in Lisbon played a significant role in the country’s transition to democracy, which is often considered solely from the perspective of elite bargaining.

My current work continues to explore the relationship between people, states and politics in a number of ways. Together with colleagues at the Centre for History & Economics and elsewhere, I direct an international research network exploring Inequality in Historical perspective.

At the same time, I am embarking on a new cycle of research focusing on the history of welfare, and its relationship to the historical creation and reproduction of inequalities. The decline of traditional social history and the rise of cultural history has meant that historians have tended to shy away from exploring larger questions regarding the politics of poverty and redistribution. Yet, I believe that it is possible to build on the insights of cultural history to address questions of social and economic change that informed social history in its heyday without falling prey to the kinds of structuralist reductionism that hindered it.

I am beginning by exploring the authoritarian origins of public welfare under the Salazar’s ‘New State’ (1928-1974), asking how its birth relates to Portugal’s position as a colonial power, and to international exchanges of ideas about economics, state action and rights in the 1930s and 1940s, interests that have led me to collaborate on the Centre for History & Economics’ project on Economic Crisis and Health in Historical Perspective. A part of this work feeds into a collaborative project with colleagues in the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon that investigates why contemporary is one of the most unequal societies among the industrialised nations, with only the UK and the US displaying greater gaps between rich and poor.

I received my PhD from Cambridge in 2007, where I also studied for a BA and an M.Phil in Economic and Social History. Between 2008 and 2011I held a Simon Research Fellowship at the University of Manchester, where I am now Lecturer in International History. My publications include recent articles in The Historical Journal and Contemporary European History, and I currently serve as Associate Editor for Politics for Portugal’s oldest Social Science journal, Análise Social.

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