Ana Rita Amaral is a researcher at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University, Netherlands. Her position is integrated into the larger project ‘Pressing Matter: Ownership, Value, and the Question of Colonial Heritage in Museums’, funded by the Dutch Research Agenda. She is also an Associate Researcher at the Wereldmuseum and collaborates with the ‘Religious Matters in an Entangled World’ project at Utrecht University. Rita received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Lisbon (2018), following her role as Assistant Keeper of Ethnographic Collections at the Science Museum of the University of Coimbra (2006-2011). She subsequently held a postdoctoral fellowship at the International Studies Group of the University of the Free State, South Africa (2018-2022). Over the years, she has built a robust interdisciplinary profile at the intersection of anthropology, history, religious studies, and museum studies, with a strong regional focus on West Central Africa and Angola. Her research encompasses two major strands. The first investigates Catholic missionary ethnographic and collecting practices and their entanglements with the history of anthropology and museums during the colonial period. This line of inquiry interrogates the historical trajectories and contemporary legacies of missionary heritage-making practices, contributing to broader debates on colonial heritage and restitution. The second strand focuses on the life and archive of A.F.F. da Silva Porto, a 19th-century long-distance trader in the Benguela highlands. This line has advanced through a range of collaborations, including co-editing an academic English edition of Silva Porto’s travel journals with Dr J Hogan (under contract with Oxford University Press); investigating Silva Porto’s categorisation practices in the project ‘Processes of Subject Constitution in African Contexts,’ led by Dr I Dulley (2018–2020); exploring Silva Porto’s correspondence with African political authorities in the ‘Indigenous Colonial Archives’ project, directed by Dr R Roque (2020-2022); researching trade and normative practices during her fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Legal Theory and Legal History, in collaboration with Dr M Dias Paes and the ‘Global Legal History on the Ground’ research group (2021); and highlighting the role of African agents in the production of knowledge about Africa in the project’ Knowledge networks in 19th century Africa’, led by Dr S Albuquerque (2023-2026). Rita’s publication record includes articles and book chapters in English, French, and Portuguese, which reflect her interdisciplinary expertise, as well as contributions to international conferences and workshops. She has co-organised key academic events, such as the international online conference’ Crossing Histories of Writing in the Portuguese Colonial Empire’ (2022), and the workshops’ Unpacking Missionary Collections’ (Utrecht University, 2022) and ‘Missionary Colonial Assemblages and the Mission of Museums: The Spirit on Display’ (Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome, 2024).