Hugo Silveira Pereira
Honorary Visiting Fellow

Profile

Biography

Hugo Silveira Pereira is an Assistant Researcher at CIUHCT – Interuniversity Research Centre for the History of Science and Technology (NOVA School of Science and Technology) and Honorary Visiting Fellow at the History Department (University of York). Previously, he was Visiting Scholar at the History Department of the MIT.

He holds a PhD in History and has published several works about Portugal’s mainland and colonial railways. His current academic interests include photography of activities of science, technology, engineering, and medicine in the Portuguese colonial and mainland context in the second half of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth century. He is the editor-in-chief of TST – Transportes, Servicios y Telecomunicaciones.

Research

Overview

Hugo Silveira Pereira’s original research interest was the implementation of the Portuguese railway network in the second half of the nineteenth century, from the perspective of political and parliamentary history. His Masters degree and his PhD dissertation are on this topic.

Later, his interest shifted to the colonial lines built by Portugal in its former imperial possessions in Africa and India, using the lens of History of Technology (large technical systems, technopolitics, portals of globalisation, territorial appropriation, technodiplomacy). In this field he worked with scholars such as Ian J. Kerr and Bruno J. Navarro.

His current research project debates photography of activities, agents, and artefacts of science, technology, engineering, and medicine and its use to create technoscientific landscapes in Portugal and its former colonies. He is also interested in how photography was a key tool to create unequal and discriminatory relationships between the colonisers and the colonised, with consequences that are still felt today.

Publications

Selected publications

Pereira, Hugo Silveira. "Railway Imperialism Revisited: The Failed Line from Macao to Guangzhou". Technology and Culture, 62:1 (2021), 82-104. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0003 

Pereira, Hugo Silveira. "Expertise and policy-making: Main actors, debates and outcomes in the making of the Portuguese railway network (1850–90)". Journal of Transport History, OnlineFirst (2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0022526620908585

Pereira, Hugo Silveira. "A railway travel narrative in 1882 Portugal". Studies in Travel Writing, 23:3 (2019): 217-243. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2020.1718838

Pereira, Hugo Silveira. "The Ambaca railway in Angola: History of a failed public-private partnership (1885-1914 and briefly onwards)". Revista de Historia Industrial, 28:77 (2019): 53-91. https://doi.org/10.1344/rhi.v28i77.28537

Pereira, Hugo Silveira. "Cultura material, progresso, civilização e identidade nacional: Os caminhos de ferro coloniais em Angola e Moçambique (c. 1870 - c. 1915)". Revista Tempo e Argumento, 11:27 (2019): 221-254. http://dx.doi.org/10.5965/2175180311272019221

Pereira, Hugo Silveira, and Ian J. Kerr. "Railways and Economic Development in India and Portugal: The Mormugão and Tua Lines Compared, ca. 1880 to ca. 1930, and Briefly Onwards". Revista Brasileira de História, 39:81 (2019): 209-234. https://doi.org/10.1590/1806-93472019v39n81-10

Pereira, Hugo Silveira. "O caminho de ferro da Beira em Moçambique (1890-1914): entre antagonismo tecnodiplomático e simbiose económica”. Análise Social, 44:4 (2019), 694-724. https://doi.org/10.31447/as00032573.2019233.02

Pereira, Hugo Silveira, and Bruno J. Navarro. "The implementation and development of narrow-gauge railways in Portugal as a case of knowledge transfer (c. 1850–c. 1910)". Journal of Transport History, 39:3 (2018): 355-380. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022526618791726

Pereira, Hugo Silveira. "The technodiplomacy of Iberian transnational railways in the second half of the nineteenth century". History and Technology, 33:2 (2017), 175-195. https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2017.1317847

Pereira, Hugo Silveira. "O caminho de ferro da Beira em Moçambique (1890-1914): entre antagonismo tecnodiplomático e simbiose económica”. Análise Social, 52:1 (2017), 40-71.