Born in Portugal, 1940, M. V. Cabral was a political exile in France from 1963 to the 1974 democratic revolution and is currently a Senior Researcher at the Social Sciences Institute, University of Lisbon. He was the Director of Portugal’s National Library from 1985 to 1990 and Vice-Rector of the University of Lisbon since 1998 till May 2002. He was the chairman of the Academic Board of his Institute for several years and is currently the Chairman of the Governing Board as well as a member of the Statutory Commission of the Lisbon University.
Licencié-ès-Lettres (1968) and Docteur en Histoire (Sorbonne, Paris, 1979), he was a Research Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford (1976-79) and held the chair of Portuguese History at King’s College, London (1992-95); he also visited the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Fall 1986), the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales-Paris (Spring 1990) and the Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro-Brazil (Spring 2003). Professor Cabral has published extensively on contemporary Portuguese history and society, and he is a regular contributor to the mainstream media. He is currently running several big projects in the sociology of professions and health.
He has in print a book with Vera Borges on Architecture as vocation and as profession (in Portuguese) based on a survey of Portuguese architects; his latest individual book is Health and Illness in Portugal. A survey of Portuguese social attitudes and patterns of behaviour (in Portuguese, 2002). Other recent collective books also based on survey data (in Portuguese) are Social inequalities and perceptions of justice (including his introduction and a chapter on “The perceptions of social and economic inequalities in Portugal in comparative perspective”, 2003); Religion and Bioethics (including his chapter on ‘Church attendance and social attitudes in Portugal in comparative perspective’, 2001); Work and Citizenship (including his chapter on ‘The exercise of political citizenship in Portugal’, 2000), and Portuguese Youth of Today (including his chapter on ‘Social identities and political attitudes of Portuguese young people’, 1998), as well as an individual book of essays on Political Citizenship and Social Fairness (1997). His latest publications in English are “Trust, mobilization, and political representation in Portugal”, in A. Freire et al. (editors), Portugal at the polls in 2002, Lexington Books: Lanham, pp. 201-223; and “The Political Economy of the Portuguese Labour Market”, in N. Bermeo (editor), Unemployment in Southern Europe: coping with the consequences (London: Frank Cass & Co., 2000).
