PhD in History, by the European University Institute of Florence (Italy), in 1992, Isabel dos Guimarães Sá teaches Early Modern European History at the History Department of the University of Minho. She also collaborates with the Social Sciences Institute of the Lisbon University

Isabel Sá develops research in the fields of History of Portugal and its empire from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and has written several books on the Portuguese confraternities of Misericórdia, as well as biographies of three consort queens of Portugal (Leonor de Lencastre, Isabel and Maria of Castile and Aragon)  (1498-1525).