DINÂMIA'CET-Iscte researcher Nuno Grancho selected to be Visiting Professor at Brown University

DINÂMIA'CET-Iscte congratulates Nuno Grancho on his selection as Visiting Professor, to teach during the Spring Semester of 2027, in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University. The researcher will additionally collaborate with the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the same institution.

Established through a joint initiative between the Luso-American Development Foundation (FLAD) and Brown University, the Visiting Professor programme annually selects two professors, either of Portuguese nationality or residing in Portugal, for a semester-long teaching appointment. The selection took into account the quality of the curriculum vitae, teaching experience in English, and the relevance of the course programme proposed by the researcher.

The selection committee comprised António Costa Pinto, Coordinating Researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon; Onésimo Teotónio Almeida, Professor and Researcher at Brown University; João Cardoso Rosas, Professor at the University of Minho; Cristiana Bastos, Anthropologist and Researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon; Patrícia Ferreira, Director of Graduate Studies and Assistant Professor at Brown University; and Michael Baum, FLAD Executive Board Member.

Nuno Grancho will teach the course 'Espaços de Contacto: Arquitectura, Colonialismo e Descolonização no Mundo de Língua Portuguesa' (Spaces of Contact: Architecture, Colonialism, and Decolonization in the Portuguese-Speaking World). The curriculum is designed to analyse the history of architecture and urbanism across the Lusophone world utilizing postcolonial and decolonial theoretical frameworks. It examines the methodologies by which Portuguese colonialism influenced spatial practices, academic discourses, and historiographies from the late Enlightenment through to the 1960s. By employing specific case studies and comparative approaches, the course explores themes including colonial urbanism, Brazilian modernisms, Afro-Lusophone urban centres, and post-independence spatial transformations, thereby contributing to a critical and decentred reading of the global histories of architecture and the city.

Nuno Grancho is an architect, professsor and integrated researcher at DINÂMIA’CET-iscte, whose work examines how spatial practices of power and resistance, through architecture and cities, shape modernity and coloniality in South Asia. His research centres on human and material agency within the epistemology and geopolitics of architecture and urbanism, paying particular attention to the relationships between the public and private spheres in spatial configurations. Between 2021 and 2024, he was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Centre for Privacy Studies at the University of Copenhagen, leading the project Privacy on the Move, and a professor at the Royal Danish Academy. In 2024, he was a Visiting Researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is currently an Affiliated Scholar at the University of Copenhagen and the Royal Danish Academy, and an Affiliated Member of the Indian Ocean World Centre at McGill University.