About me

Filipe Carreira da Silva is Research Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon. He is also a Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge. He is the founding editor of the Theory Workshop book series at Brill. His areas of interest include social theory, intellectual history, modern welfare states, comparative historical sociology, and social revolutions. Filipe Carreira da Silva's current research focuses on humanism and empire.

Filipe Carreira da Silva received a B.A. in Sociology from the Lisbon University Institute/ISCTE (1998), a M.Phil. in Social Sciences from the University of Lisbon (2002), a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Cambridge (2003), and a Habilitation in Sociology from the University of Lisbon (2016). He was Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge from 2003-2006, and was a Fulbright post-doctoral scholar at Harvard University in 2003-2004. He has visited the University of Chicago several times from 2003-2009, where he worked with Donald N. Levine and Terry N. Clark. Since 2005, he is based at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon. In 2009, Carreira da Silva visited the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem as visiting scholar under the sponsorship of S.N. Eisenstadt. In 2011, he worked as visiting scholar at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University under the sponsorship of Jeffrey C. Alexander. He is the director and founder of the Theory Hub, a research group based in Cambridge. The Theory Hub is active in four main areas: the Theory Hub Advanced Training (since 2018); Theory Hub Publications Accelerator (since 2018); Theory Hub Reading Groups (since 2019); Theory Hub Grants (since 2016). He has been a member of the European Research Council (ERC) panel SH3, 'The Social World and its Interactions', since 2025.


He is the author of ten monographs, including the 2010 American Sociological Association's Distinguished Book Award in the History of Sociology, Mead and Modernity, and, more recently, The Politics of the Book (Penn State UP, 2019), co-authored with Mónica Brito Vieira. 


A social theorist, Filipe Carreira da Silva specialises in American philosophical pragmatism (especially, G.H. Mead and the Chicago school of sociology), twentieth century cultural and critical theory, and historical comparative sociology. His scholarly interests center on the interplay between the theory building and the history of theory, with special regard to the political domain, both institutional (constitutions, rights, political regimes) and socio-cultural (political cultures, social movements). He has written on classical and contemporary social theory (with Patrick Baert), modern welfare regimes’ formation, and more recently on sociology books as cultural objects (with Mónica Brito Vieira). His current research is on humanism and empire. It asks: what lessons does the anticolonial critique of humanism hold for contemporary debates on the Anthropocene, climate change and human rights history? This research is funded by FCT (Race Trouble, 2022.04225.PTDC), the British Academy (Decolonising Humanism, SRG2223\230092) and the Cambridge Humanities Research Grant Scheme (Decolonising Humanitarianism, 2025-27).