Elisa Scaraggi

Elisa Scaraggi is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History at NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities in Lisbon and a visiting scholar at the African Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. She obtained her PhD in Comparative Studies (2020) at the University of Lisbon, with a fellowship by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). She is interested in how colonialism and coloniality shaped the political, social, and cultural context of nations that emerged from the dissolution of the Portuguese empire, with emphasis on Angola and Brazil. Her research addresses questions regarding the production of art and culture in violent and authoritarian environments, focusing on the entanglement between personal and collective experiences in personal archives, as well as in autobiographies, memoirs, and other pieces of life-writing. Her current research focuses on the personal archive of Angolan intellectual and politician Mário Pinto de Andrade as a key to uncover new narratives on Angola’s recent past and the relation between culture and nationalism.

Fields of interest
History; African Studies; Cultural Studies; Post-colonial Studies; Comparative Literature; Life-writing.

Key words
​Personal archives; Liberation struggles; Decolonization; Angola.