Clara Saraiva is a senior researcher at Center for Comparative Studies in Lisbon, University of Lisbon, a researcher of the Center for Research in Anthropology (CRIA) and a Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She was a Visiting Professor at University of California Berkeley (2013), Brown University and a Research Fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown (2001-2002 and 2008) and at the Université d´Aix-en-Provence (France-2005).
Her main fields of research deal with religion and ritual, drawing especially on the conceptions and practices of death from a cross-cultural perspective ( USA, Portugal, Guinea-Bissau, immigrants in Portugal) and transnational religions, namely Afro-Brazilian religions in Portugal. She is the vice-president of the Society for International Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF), President of the Association of Portuguese Anthropology (APA), and a board member of the of the Ethics task Force of the World Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA).
