Nota biográfica

Beatriz Valverde Contreras is currently an associate research fellow at the Centro de Estudos Sociais de Coimbra within the research project "Humanity internationalized. Cases, dynamics and comparisons (1945-1980)". She was formerly associated to the research group "Os mundos do (sub)desenvolvimento: processos e legados do império colonial português em perspectiva comparada (1945-1975)", led by Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo. She studied at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and was a PhD researcher in the Departamento de Historia Moderna of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC). In this research phase, she was also affiliated during invited stays to the University of Freiburg and the Technische Universität of Berlin, in Germany, and to the EHESS in France. Beatriz Valverde Contreras's PhD thesis "El Imperio Español en el siglo XIX: la memoria de la Historia y la identidad nacional. Personajes y gestas de la Edad Moderna en las exposiciones universales y las conmemoraciones culturales españolas, 1875-1905" obtained in 2013 the award (Premio Extraordinario) of the Faculty of Geography and History of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Between 2012 and 2016, she participated in research projects on sixteenth and seventeenth-century (Siglo de Oro) Spanish history related to Miguel de Cervantes's work, and took part in the elaboration of the Gran Enciclopedia Cervantina, edited by Carlos Alvar Ezquerra. In recent years, her research interests have, on the one hand, turned to focus on social practices related to violence and protest between Spain and Portugal between 1885 and 1910; she particularly concentrated on the different motives, often beyond the narrower context of labour struggles, that characterised social unrest. Thanks to research in numerous Portuguese and Spanish archives, Beatriz Valverde Contreras mobilised different source types to understand these practices; in relation to that activity, she also participated in various conferences on public order in Europe in contemporary history. On the other hand, Beatriz Valverde Contreras analysed contexts of forced labour and local life in São Tomé e Príncipe, in the 1930s in particular. Regarding questions of ordering and repression, she also took part in research on everyday life history and repression by the Polícia Internacional e da Defesa do Estado in the archipelago of the Azores in the 1950s. Through these different activities, Beatriz Valverde Contreras's focuses of interest have grown into wider questions concerning the late 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, questioning elements of the social history of Spain and Portugal (and societies under Portuguese colonialism). Her principal focus remains on social unrest, relations with authorities, but also the ordering of local societies through labour practices and labour coercion, e.g. within colonial forced labour. Currently, her interest within the abovementioned project centres on the development of white settlements in the regions of Cuanza Sul and Cuanza Norte in Angola in the underresearched early years of the 1960s.