His teaching career in higher education began at the University of Kent, where he was awarded a PhD in film studies. He then taught at NOVA University Lisbon before moving to the University of Coimbra. He is the director of the MA in Art Studies and coordinator of LIPA - Laboratory for Investigating and Practicing Art at the University of Coimbra.
Research
Branco is a researcher at the Centre for 20th CenturyInterdisciplinary Studies at the University of Coimbra, after leaving the NOVA Institute of Philosophy. He has been an invited member of the film criticism group "The Magnifying Class" at the University of Oxford, coordinated by Andrew Klevan. His research work focuses on the aesthetics and poetics of works of the moving image, in their relations with philosophy, history, Marxism and religion.
Journals
From 2010 to 2019, he was one of the editors of Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image. He co-edits Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies, the only academic journal dedicated to the study and discussion of Stanley Cavell’s work.
A lay member of the Order of Preachers, Branco is a devout Catholic. He was received into the Lay Fraternity of Saint Dominic in Porto in 2012 and made his perpetual profession as a lay Dominican in 2017, in a Mass presided by the then Master of the Order, Bruno Cadoré, in Fatima.
Branco is a regular contributor for Pontos SJ, the portal of the Jesuits in Portugal.
Activism
Much of his political activism has to do with uniting the Left. As a trade unionist, he has been a member of the Teachers’ Union of the Centre Region and the , acting in various capacities since 2014. In 2020, in the XIII Congress of the CGTP-IN, he was elected for the National Council and its Executive Board, a possibility previously disclosed by the press.
O Trabalho das Imagens: Estudos sobre Cinema e Marxismo . Lisbon: Página a Página, 2020.
Escrita em Movimento: Apontamentos Críticos sobre Filmes . Lisbon: Documenta, 2020.
Por Dentro das Imagens: Obras de Cinema, Ideias do Cinema . Lisbon: Documenta, 2016.
Selected edited journal issues
Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, no. 9, .
Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, no. 8, .
Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, no. 4, .
Selected articles and book chapters
“The Urban and the Domestic: Spaces of American Film Noir”. In New Approaches to Cinematic Spaces, ed. Filipa Rosário and Iván Villarmea Álvarez, pp. 85-96. London: Routledge, 2018.
. Journal of Lusophone Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, "Special Dossier on Portuguese Cinema", ed. Clara Rowland and Estela Vieira, pp. 41–58.
“Sembène, Ousmane ”. In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, Vol. I, ed. Immanuel Ness and Zack Cope, pp. 218-222. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
“Situating Comedy: Duration and Inhabitation in Classical American Sitcoms”. In Television Aesthetics and Style, ed. Jason Jacobs and Steven Peacock, pp. 93-102. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.
