Lines of research
Art History, Heritage, Culture, and Sociabilities
The research is related to the historical, theoretical, methodological, and practical processes related to the history of art and culture, including visual culture and the history of images in all their variations, amplitudes, and complexities. It focuses on studying artistic objects and collections, investigating their interdisciplinary relationships.
This research is also interested in theoretical reflections about movies and audiovisual in dialogue with other arts and fields of knowledge from a historical and political perspective. It seeks to critically reflect on the aesthetics of moving images alongside aspects such as authors, genre, film analysis, and narrative construction.
Another aspect of this research is related to the discussion on the history of women and gender as a fertile ground for investigation to analyze female protagonism in the political culture in Brazilian society and dissents against gender roles between the 19th and 20th centuries. Intersectionality – materialized in the triad of gender, race, and class – is essential to this discussion.
The investigations include reflections, practices, and processes focused on heritage and how to preserve it, given its characteristic polysemy. Research that, both locally and internationally, discusses the concepts of historical, cultural, natural, material, and immaterial heritage while also addressing topics, trajectories, policies, safeguarding experiences, mobilization strategies, reparation, heritage education, management, safeguarding and elaboration, performance, and adoption of decolonial perspectives.
Global History, Microhistory, and Epistemic Dialogues
From a polycentric perspective, the research adopts the Program’s tradition with microhistory methodology and its relationship with global history to study history, culture, and power from the perspective of social history. Microhistory uses generative analyses that consider the diversity of people and groups and how they understand the world and manage relationships. In this model, relevant questions are identified with an unpredictable myriad of answers that, in turn, can generate other broad questions that had been previously neglected. Concepts such as translocality, connected histories, comparative history, strategies, and networks of individuals and groups translate the epistemological complexity of the research. The notion of situated knowledge as a condition for universality and knowledge of local research as a strategy for thinking about global, colonial, post-colonial, and transnational contexts are at the core of the investigations.
This research line focuses on research about Atlantic history from the 15th to the 21st centuries, with an emphasis on Brazil and America, in the history of pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial Africa and various topics of global history, covering the world of work, family history, history and inequalities, political elites, political cultures, coloniality of power, slavery, race and racism, history and law, ancient regime cultures, modernity and colonialism, slavery and capitalism, rights and citizenship, ethnicities, “cultures, religions, and religiosities”, diasporas and Black cultures, gender and politics, intersectionalities, borders, post-colonial societies, history and anthropology, Indigenous peoples, history and reparation policies, culture and nature, traditional communities, cities and peripheries, migrations, oral history, public history and epistemic dialogues, history of memory, and historiography.
Politics, Culture, and Uses of the Past
The Politics, Culture, and Uses of the Past line of research belongs to the field of Political History and Social History, which emerged from the epistemological remodeling and the expansion of research objects from the advent of new understandings about the meanings of the political and the social, in addition to the use of new sources and research methodologies. The expansion and redefinition of Political History and Social History enables the intersection between these and other fields of historiography to be reassessed.
From this perspective, this line of research seeks to reflect on the interactions between political agents, both individuals and groups, the State, various institutions, and civil society through their repertoires and political organizations and mobilizations, all as historical subjects that compose our field of analysis. The complexity of the objects involved requires this line of research to advance towards the study of political traditions and cultures concretely, their impacts on behavior and decision-making processes, the analysis of memories and political uses of the past, the investigation of capitalism and Western democracies, as well as their contexts of crisis, in line with the emergence of the extreme right, denialism, and authoritarianism, and the historical framework of reorganization of social movements, the left and the various forms of resistance and utopias. These elements make the fields of Political History and Social History ideal for interdisciplinary debates and a better understanding of complex and non-linear phenomena.
As such, this line of research seeks to bring the analyses of the classic themes of traditional Political History closer to the challenges of the History of the Present Time by promoting debates around objects and connections between different scales of time and space, with perspectives ranging from local to global, from short to long-term. All of this enables reflections about the challenges posed by new communication and information technologies, as well as digital social networks, which continually transform the notions of public space, public sphere, and public opinion, profoundly impacting social life and political participation globally.