According to the office of the Minister of Culture, Dalila Rodrigues, Diogo Ramada Curto "takes the place left vacant by the previous director-general, Maria Inês Cordeiro, due to the end of her commission, followed by her retirement in March of this year."

Diogo Ramada Curto, born in Lisbon in 1959, is a full professor in the Department of Political Studies of the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the Nova University of Lisbon (FCSH-Nova), where he graduated in History, obtained a PhD in Historical Sociology, and taught in the departments of Sociology and History, according to the biographical note released by the Ministry of Culture.

He was a visiting professor at different higher education institutions, such as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France, the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in Spain, Brown University and Yale University in the United States, and the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

Between 2000 and 2008, he held the Vasco da Gama Chair in the History of European Expansion at the European University Institute in Florence.

The research work developed by the new director-general of the BNP focuses on three areas -- written and intellectual culture, empires and colonialism, and political culture --, adding dozens of titles and articles dedicated to topics such as globalization, global history and the history of empires, the history of political ideas, the history of slavery and forced labour, as well as the approach to books and reading from the perspective of Historical Sociology.

Among his most recent works are "Um país em bicos de pés - Escritores, artistas e movimentos culturais" (Edições70, 2023), and "O colonialismo português em África - De Livingstone a Luandino" (Edições70, 2020).

In 2014, he was awarded the PEN Clube Prize in the Essay category with the book "Para que serve a história?" (Tinta da China, 2013) and, in 2015, with the Jabuti Prize (collective) awarded to the work "O Brasil colonial" (Rio de Janeiro, Civilização Brasileira, 2014).

Among Ramada Curto's works are also "Políticas coloniais em tempo de revoltas - Angola circa 1961", co-authored with Teresa Furtado and Bernardo Pinto da Cruz (Afrontamento, 2016), "Cultura imperial e projectos coloniais, séculos XV-XVIII" (Campinas, Unicamp, 2009), and "Bibliografia da História do Livro em Portugal" (BNP, 2005).

He was co-founder and director of the collection "Memória e Sociedade" of the former publisher Difel, which included forty titles on history and social sciences between 1988 and 2005, and of "História e Sociedade", in Edições70 of the Almedina Group, with 24 titles, since 2010, with Nuno Domingos and Miguel Jerónimo. He is co-organizer of "A Expansão Marítima Portuguesa. 1400-1800" (Edições70, 2010).

The previous director-general of the BNP, Maria Inês Cordeiro, had been reappointed to the position in 2019, having been at the head of the institution since September 2012.

Maria Inês Cordeiro has a degree in History from the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lisbon, a postgraduate degree in Librarian Archivist from the University of Coimbra, and a PhD in Information Sciences from the University of London.

Before taking up the position of deputy director of the BNP in 2006, Maria Inês Cordeiro was an advisory librarian at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation's Art Library, responsible for the Information Systems Management and Innovation Projects sector between 1997 and 2006.

Previously, she had held the positions of Division Head and Director of Services at the BNP, where she worked between 1986 and 1997.

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