Rate My Professor Francisco Bethencourt

Francisco Bethencourt is the Charles Boxer Professor of History in the Department of History at King’s College London, a position he has held since 2005. He previously taught at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and served as Visiting Professor at Brown University and the Universidade de São Paulo. Earlier in his career, he directed the National Library of Portugal from 1996 to 1998 and the Gulbenkian Cultural Centre in Paris from 1999 to 2004. He chaired the Department of Portuguese Studies at King’s College London from 2007 to 2009 before joining the Department of History. Bethencourt earned his PhD on the Inquisition in 1993, receiving the Salvador Madariaga Prize from the European University Institute for the best PhD thesis that year. In 2003, he was honored by the Portuguese President of the Republic with the Order of Henry the Navigator for his achievements as a historian. He is a member of the Portuguese Academia da Marinha and the Academia Europaea. Bethencourt has served on advisory boards for the Warburg Institute and the Institute for Latin American Studies, as well as on selection committees for professorial positions at institutions including the European University Institute, Université de Paris-Sorbonne, University of Oxford, Universidade de Coimbra, and Universidade Católica Portuguesa.

Bethencourt is a leading historian of the Portuguese-speaking world and contributes to global history. His research focuses on the history of racism, inequality, rights, European expansion from the 15th to 19th centuries, religious history and the Inquisition, identities in the Portuguese-speaking world, and epic and anti-epic cultural expressions in the Iberian world. He has authored five monographs, including Strangers Within: The Rise and Fall of the New Christian Trading Elite (Princeton University Press, 2024), Direitos Humanos (Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos, 2023), Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press, 2013), and The Inquisition: A Global History, 1478-1834 (Cambridge University Press, 2009). He has edited or co-edited twenty-eight books and journal issues, such as The Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400-1800 (Cambridge University Press, with Diogo Ramada Curto). Bethencourt has published over one hundred academic articles and chapters. He received a Major Leverhulme Fellowship for his project on the New Christian Trading Elite, 1497-1773 (2017-2019) and is Principal Investigator of the European Research Council Advanced Grant project New Christian Materiality, 1450-1750 (2026-2030), the first such grant hosted by the Department of History. He curated an exhibition on Racism and Citizenship in Lisbon and is preparing others on slavery history and anti-epic culture.