Pedro Antunes

Pedro Antunes is a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History, where he works in the areas of anthropology of migration and critical heritage studies, with an interest in processes of diasporism, material culture, and histories of customary systems and common heritage. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from Iscte-IUL (2021) and was a Guest Lecturer at NOVA University Lisbon between 2021 and 2025. He is co-coordinator of the IN2PAST Doctoral School and the Working Group for Doctoral Training at the same laboratory.

His current research explores the digital revitalisation of Maghrebi Jewish-Muslim culture in diasporic contexts, as part of the project “eSefarad: modalities and practices of digital patrimonialization of the Sephardic cultural legacy in Mediterranean contexts” (CRIA, FCT, 2022–2025). He has studied the trajectories of artefacts from the collections of the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranéeand the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme, linking them to emerging digital practices in communities that speak Judezmo and Heketía. This work was developed as a visiting researcher at the Institut d’ethnologie méditerranéenne, européenne et comparative(2023). In parallel, he maintains a line of research on customary systems and micro-histories of solidarity, in continuity with his thesis Depois da Morte. O Restauro Imaterial da Encomendação das Almas [After death: the immaterial restoration of the commendation of souls] (2021). In common, these lines question modes of critical reconfiguration of popular cultures in postcolonial contexts, between memory, resistance and shared futurity.