Maria Manuel Torrão

e-mail | mariatorrao@edu.ulisboa.pt

Maria Manuel Torrão holds a Ph.D. in Early Modern History (U Azores, 2007). Since 2015, she has been a researcher at the Centre for History of the University of Lisboa (CH-ULisboa), where she is the assistant director of the CH-ULisboa¿s research group Imperial Dynamics. At the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisboa, she teaches in the African Studies Programme, of which she is the co-director. She also teaches in the MA and Ph.D. programs in History. She created and developed the undergraduate course History of Cape Vert, for which she is responsible. Maria Manuel started her career in 1987 at the Instituto de Investigação Científica e Tropical. There, between 1987 and 2007 she was part of a luso-capeverdian team that promoted the project História Geral de Cabo Verde (General History of Cape Vert). This History was the starting point of her research based on Cape Vert. Her research is focused on the slave trade between Cape Vert and the Coast of Guinea with Spanish America. As her research demonstrated, this trade was grounded on the articulation between the Iberian Empires and kinship and client-based networks in the 16th and 17th centuries. Due to this researches, Maria Manuel Torrão often collaborates in projects developed at the Faculty of Geography and History of the University of Seville. Maria Manuel Torrão also studies cartography, collection of natural knowledge, naturalist voyages and scientific missions to the Cape Vert Islands from the 16th century to the 20th century. These studies are done in connection with research on the environmental history of this islands. Furthermore, her knowledge of Cape Vert and the networks she has built in the country during her three decades of research led her to take over the role of the “middleman” between the University of Cape Vert and the University of Lisboa and also with several cultural institutions from the islands establish in Portugal.