Clare Richardson is a doctoral research fellow at the graduate school for Global Intellectual History at the Freie Universität and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She holds a master’s degree in Global History from the Freie Universität and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, as well as a bachelor’s degree in Honors Politics and Spanish and Latin American Literatures and Cultures from NYU in New York. In addition to her work in academia, Clare is a multimedia journalist who has reported internationally, most recently as a foreign correspondent for Deutsche Welle. From 2018 to 2020 she was a Lecturer in Journalism at the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne in Australia, where she taught graduate courses in video and audio journalism.

Lusophone African revolutionaries in the Cold War: The impact of anticolonial exchanges in the Global 1960s

Clare’s research focuses on the intersection of decolonization and the Cold War in Portuguese-speaking Africa during the 1960s, examining how Global South actors formed transnational connections by inspiring activism and liberation movements. This project investigates the influence of the intellectual revolutionary leaders Amílcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau and Agostinho Neto of Angola on Lusophone decolonization drives and international policymaking. How did their ideological collaboration inform nationalist movements in the 1960s and situate them in the context of the Cold War? Clare’s interest in the field developed thanks to an ERASMUS+ exchange to ISCTE in Lisbon, Portugal, where she studied the history of Portugal and its foreign policy. Her master’s thesis assessed how Cold War pressures led to a rift in the Western bloc in its material support for Portugal’s suppression of uprisings in its African colonies.