Irene Flunser Pimentel

Pimentel is a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History of NOVA University. She worked on a project entitled "Political Justice in the Transition to Democracy in Portugal" until 2012. This was followed from 2013 to 2018 by a project called "The political justice process in relation to PIDE/DGS, in the transition to democracy in Portugal". The PIDE was the Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado, or secret police of the Estado Novo, which became the Directorate-General of Security (DGS) in 1968, being disbanded in 1974. Her other research interests include the Second World War in neutral Portugal; Portugal and refugees; Portugal and the Holocaust; and Portuguese colonial prisons and concentration camps.

Pimentel was politically active until 1978. She had Marxist-Leninist views. After leaving school she spent a year in Paris, together with the large number of Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) and other Portuguese exiles. After the April 1974 Carnation Revolution, which overthrew the Estado Novo, she worked with the Communist Electoral Front (Marxist–Leninist), which participated in the elections for the Constituent Assembly that drafted Portugal's new constitution.

Irene Flunser Pimentel (born 1950) is a Portuguese historian who concentrates on the study of the 20th century in Portugal, particularly during the time of the Estado Novo regime, with particular reference to the experiences of women.

Irene Flunser Pimentel was born in the Portuguese capital of Lisbon on 2 May 1950. She came from a wealthy family and attended the Lycée français Charles Lepierre, the French-language school in Lisbon, also spending some time at a school in Switzerland. Her mother was Swiss and her father ran a pharmaceutical company. Beginning university studies at the age of 30, she obtained a degree in history from the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon, a master's in contemporary history from the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of NOVA University Lisbon in 1997 and a doctorate in institutional history and politics of the 20th Century, in 2007 from the same university.