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João Figueiredo

João Figueiredo is an Assistant in the Department of History at the University of Basel, Switzerland, where he has been responsible for the teaching area “African History to 1800” since February 2026. He holds a PhD in Advanced Studies in History, specialising in Empire, Politics and Post-colonialism, from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra (2016). He subsequently participated as a postdoctoral researcher in the project LEGALPL – Legal Pluralism in the Portuguese Empire (18th–20th centuries) (2018–2021), funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and hosted at the Faculty of Law of NOVA University Lisbon and the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon. In 2021, he was a Fellow of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg “Einheit und Vielfalt im Recht” (EViR) at the University of Münster, Germany, after which he served as a full-time Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the same centre until June 2025. He then assumed the same position on a part-time basis in the Department of History at Leibniz University Hannover, Germany. He is the author of Sorcery and Jurisdiction in Angola: Law and Multinormativity in Early Modern West Central Africa (Cologne: Böhlau, 2025) and co-editor, together with Sebastian Spitra (University of Vienna), of The Legal Pluralism of Heritage (London: Routledge, 2026). Since 2026, he has served as Coordinating Editor of the Cultural and History Studies section of the Nordic Journal of African Studies (NJAS).

Main interests and research topics: Imperial and Colonial History; History of Slavery; Legal History; Material Culture, Memory, and Museums.

ORCID: https://orcid.org/my-orcid?orcid=0000-0001-9981-9064

Ciência Vitae: https://www.cienciavitae.pt//en/EE13-2249-DFB9

Repository: https://coimbra.academia.edu/Jo%C3%A3oFigueiredo

Research field(s): Empires, colonialism and post-colonialism