Márcia Gonçalves is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Institute for History and specialises in the history of modern European colonialism (19th-20th Centuries).

More information about Márcia Gonçalves

Fields of interest

Márcia Gonçalves specialises in the history of modern European colonialism (19th-20th Centuries). She obtained her PhD in History and Civilisation from the European University Institute in 2015 with a dissertation on national identity and empire in Portugal in the 1930s and 1940s. She currently holds a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at Leiden University. Her research interests are European and world history from a transnational and trans-imperial perspective, in particular the links between ideas of Europeanness, racial thought, and belonging from the late nineteenth century onward.

Research

From 1 February 2022, she will develop the project GRADIENTS. Funded by the European Commission under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme (MSCA-IF, Grant No 101032093 ), this project will explore what it meant to be European in colonial Africa where identification as European often did not depend on skin colour and was understood on a spectrum with many gradients. Moving away from approaches centred in nation-based empires and arguing for a transnational approach centred in interactions and connections between actors in the colonies, it takes the Portuguese in the Congo Free State as a point of departure. It will bring nuance into discussions of colonial European identities that usually focus on Northern Europe as the only cradle and norm of ‘Europeanness’ and shed light on the (dis)continuities of imperialism in Africa.

Key publications

Gonçalves, Márcia (2021), “The Scramble for Africa reloaded? Portugal, European colonial claims, and the distribution of colonies in the 1930s”, Contemporary European History, 30: 1, 2-15 — Winner of the Contemporary European History Prize 2019

Gonçalves, Márcia (2018), “Of peasants and settlers: ideals of Portugueseness, imperial nationalism and European settlement in Africa, c.1930–c.1945”, European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire, 25:1, 166-186 — Winner of the A.H. de Oliveira Marques Prize 2019

Grants and awards

• 2023: Humanities Faculty Fund for Research Collaboration – SEED Money
• 2022-2025: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions – Individual Fellowship, European Commission. 
• 2020: Contemporary European History Prize 2019 for the best article in the journal Contemporary European History by an early career researcher. 
• 2019: A.H. de Oliveira Marques Prize 2019 for the best article or book chapter on Portuguese history published in 2018 awarded by the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies (ASPHS).
• 2009-2013: Doctoral grant from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology for the project Beyond the Imperial Mystique (at the European University Institute)
• 2008-2011: Doctoral grant from the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the project Beyond the Imperial Mystique (at the European University Institute).

Publications

Activities