Inês Guarda is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at King’s College London on the MATERIA project. Trained as a historian of the early modern Iberian and Atlantic worlds, her research brings together archival scholarship, material culture, and the social history of institutions, mobility, and exchange. Her academic trajectory spans historical research centres, international fellowships, and interdisciplinary projects in Portugal, the United Kingdom, the United States, and South Korea, equipping her with extensive experience in working across archives, languages, and methodological traditions.

She has conducted long-term research on Portuguese imperial, Afro-Atlantic, and Sephardi histories, with particular attention to documentary practices, legal cultures, and transnational networks. She is the author of Europeans as Coastal Brokers in the West and West-Central African Slave Trade (1680–1720) (Brill, 2025) and A História dos Registos e do Notariado em Portugal (INCM, 2024), and has published peer-reviewed articles and chapters on Atlantic slavery, institutional history, and Lusophone cultural worlds. Alongside her research profile, she has held teaching posts in history, sociology, and Portuguese studies, involving curriculum design, academic mentoring, and intercultural education.

This combination of archival expertise, institutional history, teaching experience, and international collaboration informs her current work on materiality, documentation, and knowledge production in historical contexts.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• New Christians and material culture
• European Expansion (15th-19th centuries)
• Gender History
• African slave trade
• Cross-cultural exchanges

Teaching

Dr Inês Guarda has taught Portuguese and Lusophone history and culture, with particular emphasis on the Portuguese colonial experience, the Afro-Atlantic slave trade, Lusophone Africa, and modern state formation and nationalism.

Expertise and public engagement 

Inês Guarda's public engagement work addresses the colonial past, slavery, cultural memory, and their contemporary legacies. She has contributed to public-facing research within the ERC project Modern Moves, presenting archival-based findings on Afro-diasporic cultures, and carried out commissioned historical research on state documentation and institutional memory for the Instituto dos Registos e do Notariado, published as a monograph in 2024. As a Camões Institute Lecturer, she organised and coordinated cultural programmes for non-academic audiences, including film cycles and the exhibition O Legado de um Cravo, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Portuguese Revolution of 25 April.

Selected publications

Europeans as Coastal Brokers in the West and West-Central African Slave Trade (1680–1720), Brill, Leiden, 2025.

A História dos Registos e do Notariado em Portugal, Imprensa Nacional–Casa da Moeda, Lisbon, 2024.“

The Angolan Slave Trade in the Early 18th Century: The Atlantic Networks of Rodrigo da Costa de Almeida”, in Amélia Polónia and Cátia Antunes (eds.), Mechanisms of Global Empire Building, CITCEM/Edições Afrontamento, Porto, 2017.