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Overview
Affiliations
AffiliationTelephone
Assistant Professor in the Department of Archaeology+44 (0) 191 33 41154
Member of the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 
Fellow of the Institute for Medical Humanities

Biography

I am an historical archaeologist working on colonialism, decolonisation, conflict and resistance in Southern Europe and in the Atlantic World, and committed to the ongoing struggle to decolonise the discipline. I studied History and Archaeology at the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, where I obtained my BA (2005) and MA (2010), and later completed a PhD in Anthropology at Binghamton University (2017). I joined the Department of Archaeology as an Assistant Professor in Historical Archaeology in the summer of 2020, after having lived in Portugal, Brazil and the United States for several years. Prior to coming to Durham, I was a researcher with the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi in Brazil (2010), a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Brown University (2019-20), and a Postdoctoral Associate in the Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies program at the Department of Art History, Rutgers University (2017-19). I am also affiliated with the Centre for Archaeology at the Universidade de Lisboa, where I have been a junior researcher funded by Portugal’s Foundation for Science and Technology.

Selected current projects

Cacheu Archaeological Project

This community-based project focuses on the foundation of Cacheu in today’s Republic of Guinea-Bissau and the development of power relations across economic, social, political, and cultural lines between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. Our team is particularly interested in the material circumstances that enabled the transatlantic trade of enslaved people, as well as the variety of responses produced by communities along the Cacheu river basin. We are also interested in the legacies of colonialism, and how the heritage of slavery and forced labour is mobilised by communities and Guinea-Bissauan state agents in nation-building politics. Find out more here.

Heritage from Below. Drežnica: Traces and Memories 1941-1945 

Between 1941 and 1945, the region of Drežnica, in central Croatia, was occupied and repeatedly attacked by Axis forces. Italian fascists, Nazis and their local collaborators sought to suppress the resistance and dislodge partisan fighters from a vast network of camps, safe houses, and cave shelters across the forest. In this community-based project, our team aims to bring visibility to multi-temporal heritage practices enabled by experiences of collective pride, trauma and healing, and respond to current local demands for technical expertise. Click here to find out more.

Research interests

  • Community archaeology
  • Visual culture
  • Historical archaeology
  • Archaeology of the contemporary past
  • Colonialism
  • Decolonisation
  • African diaspora
  • Conflict archaeology
  • Plantationocene
  • Slavery and forced labour
  • Politics of heritage
  • Critical heritage studies
  • Sensorial archaeology
  • Decolonial practices

Publications

Authored book

Chapter in book

Doctoral Thesis

Journal Article

Other (Print)

Supervision students