José da Silva Horta

e-mail | joses.horta@letras.ulisboa.pt

José da Silva Horta completed a PhD in History of the Portuguese Expansion, at the University of Lisbon in 2003. He is Full Professor in History (2024) with Habilitation (“Agregação”) in History of Africa (2021) at the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon (FLUL). He is a researcher and Director of the Centre for History of the University of Lisbon since February 2022. He was Visiting Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil. His publications and involvement in research projects have been devoted to the early History of Greater Senegambia/Upper Guinea Coast, fifteenth to seventeenth centuries and its Atlantic interactions. Past and present topics of research: perceptions of space; reciprocal representations; modalities of political and trade relationship; weapons, ivory and slave trade internal and external; production, uses and meanings of material culture; Jewish communities and relations with Islam; local appropriations of “Christianization” processes; models of identity construction and social status; circulation of people and religious ideas; diffusion of oral traditions and their registration in written sources; religions and interaction of religious experiences.