Nuno Medeiros

Nuno Medeiros is an Assistant Professor in Communication and Culture at Faculdade de Letras (School of Arts and Humanities) of Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal, affiliated to the Department of History and the Literatures, Arts and Cultures Division. He is currently the head of the university’s Programme in Communication and Culture. He is a researcher in sociology, history, culture, media and communication at CEComp – Centre for Comparative Studies (Universidade de Lisboa) in full membership. He is also a researcher at CHUL – Centre for History (Universidade de Lisboa), IHC – Institute of Contemporary History (Universidade Nova de Lisboa), and CETHA – Centre for Studies in Theories of History and Historiographies (Universidade Federal do Sul e Sudeste do Pará, Brazil). He holds a bachelor of arts in Sociology, a master’s degree in Historical Sociology, and a PhD in Sociology of Culture, awarded by Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas of Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He was a visiting scholar at Brown University (USA) and an invited speaker at several venues in Portugal and abroad. He was Assistant Professor of Sociology at Escola Superior de Tecnologia da Saúde de Lisboa of Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa (Portugal). He was also a lecturer at Universidade do Algarve and Instituto Superior de Ciências da Saúde Egas Moniz (Portugal), and an invited professor at Universidad CEU San Pablo, in Madrid (Spain). One of the main areas of scientific inquiry in which Nuno Medeiros has specialised in is Historical Sociology of the book, publishing, bookselling, reading and print culture and communication, as well as cultural heritage and cultural practices. His current research is centred on mass publishing, popular culture and the study of publishing house archives as a means of exploring the intricacies of the contemporary book in the Portuguese-speaking world, with a special focus on Portugal, Brazil, and the cross-Atlantic book trade, in authoritarian and democratic regimes. He has participated in and co-authored various structural R&D projects funded by major funding institutions in Portugal, namely Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (the Portuguese science funding public agency) and the renowned Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, and Brazil, such as Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (the Brazilian federal public science funding agency). The focuses of these research projects included popular urban culture in colonial and post-colonial spaces; reading in Portugal in the 20th century; censorship; the social nature of reading, publishing and bookselling; popular books and mass-market publishing; book circulation and print culture in the Atlantic in colonial and post-colonial times; cultural mediation of sciences in Brazil; Latin America cultural stances in UNESCO debates; graphic industry in contemporary society; and distance learning. He is coordinating as PI a project about social perceptions of forest landowners on the forest and the rural world. His master’s dissertation was awarded the Prémio Fundação Mário Soares, the most prestigious prize in Contemporary History in Portugal. More recently he has explored the social and historical realm of food. He has also been working for two decades from a sociological and historical perspective on the topics of health and social structure, and environment. He has been the recipient of several scientific fellowships or grants from such entities as Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia and Luso-American Foundation (Portugal), Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa Científica do Estado de São Paulo (Brazil) or Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa/European Commission (Portugal/EU). He is an expert reviewer/evaluator with international recognition, appointed by UEFISCDI (Romania), LZP/LCS (Latvia), the European Research Executive Agency (European Commission), and the Universidad de Salamanca (Spain).