BIOGRAPHY
Miguel Moniz is an anthropologist (PhD, Brown University '04) at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais (ICS), Universidade de Lisboa in Portugal and has been a distinguished visiting scholar at Brown University and at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Moniz work has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Fulbright Foundation, European Research Council, Portuguese National Science Foundation (FCT), Fundação Luso-Americana, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rhode
Island Endowment for the Humanities, Massachusetts Cultural Council, Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, Europe for Citizens Program, and Erasmus +. He is the Executive Director of the Migrant Communities Project, a chartered 501 (C)(3) not for profit educational organization that creates humanities, cultural and societal transformative programs to improve equity and migrant visibility.
In addition to scholarly articles Moniz also publishes popular journalism and opinion. He has contributed to and his research has been featured in The Atlantic Magazine, The New York Times, Diário de Notícias, O Público, Boston Globe, Providence Journal, Fall River Herald News, New Bedford Standard Times, Cape Cod Times, Falmouth Enterprise, and Newsweek. Moniz has also provided commentary for television news programs on RTP, TVI, and SIC televisão.
current funded projects
mPI (Co-PI) “Portuguese Police Experience with Drug Decriminalization”
Rhode Island Hospital, Providence, RI
(Rhode Island Foundation, Rhode Island Hospital, Divisions of Infectious Diseases and General Internal Medicine, National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Institute on Drug Abuse (Brandon del Pozo K01DA056654 and R21DA057171)
Research Fellow “Export Portugal. Cultural Diplomacy and the Rebranding Strategies of the Estado Novo in the United States (1933-1974)” National Science Foundation of Portugal (FCT) (2022.08653.PTDC)
Universidade de Lisboa
Executive Director, Migrant Communities Project (501(c)(3) non profit) History, Cultural, and Drug Policy Educational Initiatives
RESEARCH INTERESTS
• Labor, migration and racialization
•Critical approaches to the state, nationalism and nation building
• Translocal and transnational circulation and place making from cultural, political, and legal perspectives
• Forced migration, displacement, deportation
• Geopolitics among the Azores, Portugal, US
• Associativism & migrant cultural, economic, and political organizations
• Substance use disorders and political policy
• Anthropology of music (community building, place making, migration, activism)
• Race and ethnicity theory
Additional activities
• Migration and sports
• Applied anthropology for social and racial equity, social welfare, and humanitarian ends
• Bibliology of the Azores and the Atlantic
• Material culture, rituals, intangible cultural patrimony
• Visual anthropology
Personal
I was raised in a community on Cape Cod, Massachusetts founded and built by Azorean and Cape Verdean migrant farm workers and construction laborers. In the US I have lived in Providence, RI; Boston, Fall River, MA; New York, NY; across Connecticut and in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.
I started living in Portugal on-and-off beginning in the mid-1990s (mostly in the Azores on my family's island of São Miguel and also Terceira). But after first visiting Lisbon in 1989, the city put the zap on me, and I returned frequently, moving here permanently in 2005. In Europe I have also
lived in Germany as well as in Snowdonia, in north Wales.
On the Cape, I worked laying concrete foundations in my family's masonry business, a job I held during and after college. An undergraduate anthropology honors thesis studying the Azorean crew I worked with and the Espírito Santo Festival they put on every summer in my town, led to a life time of learning and research about migrant communities and the histories and challenges in the places of my greatest affection in New England, Portugal, and other connected geographies.
