Research Topics

Area 1: History of Art

This area of concentration is intended to deal with the artistic and cultural object and theoretical-historiographic formulations associated to it. At the same time, it explores its connections with other domains of socio-cultural production.  The area offers to post-graduation students a methodical training that enables them to work on the issues related to the History of Art as a whole, including theoretical, museological and conservation problems.   

1.1) History of Art and Visual Studies

The History of Art has undergone several transformations that expanded its field, whether in what is considered Art, or in approaches applied to the artistic object and the system of arts.  Themes like studies of image, materiality and circulation of objects, reproducibility, gender, history of exhibitions, media and visual anthropology enrich the theoretical framework of the field and present new objects, as well as new views of traditional themes.  This line of research, therefore, aims at training students in the new fields of knowledge of History of Art, without being limited to pre-established geographic spaces or time frames, and debate theoretical issues referring to the development of new methods and instruments from a transnational perspective, as is the case of non-European artistic traditions.

1.2) Criticism, Curatorship and Preservation

Studies addressing works of art and architecture, in their original or current contexts, have been one of the big theoretical and methodological challenges for specialists and conservatives, but also to the general public that visits museums, exhibitions, historical sites and centers. Such challenges promote a complex understanding of social and cultural, visual and technical, anthropological and even philosophical values inherent in or assigned to the work of art, architecture, and preserved urban and rural contexts. Thus, this line of research prioritizes studies of works and collections, the artistic literature and the critic and esthetic production, built spaces and historical sites, aiming at a complex approach in the understanding of the most different social, cultural and artistic values of the Arts, their protagonists and institutions.  It also contemplates the intellectual history in the production of Brazilian and international art historiography and criticism, and it counts on important reference collections available at Unicamp, like the special collection “Cicognara Library”, Alexandre Eulálio collection and the bibliographic collections of Unicamp’s Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences.  

Area 2: Political dynamics and languages

The area represents a collection of researches on social dynamics and the plurality of political languages and is constituted as a place for creation and debates on history and the historiographic process, with freedom before theoretical traditions and historiographic conducts.  Politics is understood from a transdisciplinary perspective and in its multiple forms of manifestation in a field of tensions to be problematized based on the agents and languages that constitute it.  The relations among the subjects in their social, economic, political and cultural dimensions in Americas, Europe and Africa are historicized in distinct times. While articulating contexts and problems traditionally studied in a compartmentalized way, an analytical angle, renewed for the study of political dynamics, is formed that puts into perspective the historiography’s historicity itself, particularly with regard to Eurocentrism. For such, the area comprises five main fields of reflection: 1) manifestations of the political and Christian religious thought (09th -21st centuries) in specific historical situations that are timely manifested in the middle-ages, in the Afro-Euro-American modernity and in the contemporaneity: their theoretical matrices and the themes imbricated in their argumentation (church, feudalism, individual, freedom, power, work, wealth, poverty, revolution, citizenship, inequalities, State); 2) interweaving of political practices (languages, governability, displacements, representation games, symbolic and utopian dimensions) and cultural practices (literature, edition, press, food, photography, cinema, illustrations and media), as expression of correlations of esthetics, politics, and dynamics of power; 3) analysis of Brazilian and international historiography exploring intellectual networks, links between memory and history and relations woven across concepts, representations and social movements; 4) production of the urban universe by the city’s historical constitution, considered and the symbolic and political place of citizen formation – the legal subject of rights - , as the way in which different forms of perception and appropriation of the built space – public and private - are developed, and as field of tensions constituted and perceived from the several languages and fields of knowledge; 5) political cultures of indigenous peoples, Africans and their descendants and the way they inform power relations and their fights for rights in situations of exclusion and marginalization. Such themes are articulated in two main axes, and each of them constitutes a line of research. 

2.1) Historiography, Spatialities and Representations

Exploring the different forms through which political languages are defined and exteriorized is the core objective of the themes and fields of research of historiography, in spatialities and in the forms of discursive representation in their different theoretical perspectives and methods for treating the documentation. Here we are interested in investigating the political, social and cultural dimensions of different disciplines, in different times, perceived in the intersection with spatialities, contemplating urban, literary and editorial forms, languages and dynamics.  To these concerns, we add an understanding of the relevance of transformation in the historical discourse and the discipline History in today’s public sphere. Therefore, the line is also interested in the study of the different modalities of publicization of the historical knowledge by media and digital humanities, among other possibilities, including the formation of networks and intellectual debates in global scale. 

2.2) Displacements, Inequalities and Rights

The line comprises research turned to the study of inequalities in Africa and Americas in colonial and post-colonial contexts, with focus on the constitution of categories of exclusion and belongingness in the ambit of social, cultural, economic, political and ethnic-racial relations.  The development of this problematic implies the study of political cultures of individuals in situation of exclusion and the way they inform the perception of their places in social relations, and their social struggles for prerogatives and political rights in face of the institutional apparatuses of colonial states and nation-states.  For such, a bibliographic framework is mobilized that questions ethnocentric historiographic canons closely linked to the nation-state landmarks, emphasizing political dynamics constituted from the transit of people and ideas, particularly their different forms of collective identification. 

Area 3: Social History, Differences and Conflicts

This area studies the production of differences of class, race and gender over time, seeking to understand how they act in the conformation of processes of domination and exploitation and how they impacted on identities, and the conflicts between the different historical subjects. The researches focus on the study of subaltern groups: their horizontal and vertical relations of confrontation and solidarity, their values and claims, as well as the ways they act.  The researchers are also interested in the ways these groups were seen and represented by intellectuals, authorities, bosses and other agents which they face in different situations of their daily experience. The two lines of research that form the area are connected, and emphasize specific themes inside these wider matters.    

3.1) Worlds of Work in Slavery and in Freedom

The line’s main theme is the experience of workers in slavery and in freedom, problematizing the borders of the several forms of compulsion to work.  The researches analyze the relations between workers and other social subjects  (masters, bosses, authorities), their forms of organization and action (brotherhoods, associations, clubs, unions, parties), struggles and social movements (quilombos, uprisings, insurrections, stoppages), ways of life and daily life (housing, health, leisure, religion, instruction, food), values and conceptions (traditions, habits, beliefs, ideologies, utopias), clashes in legal arenas, cultural and intellectual production (press, theater, literature, memories). 

3.2) Africa and African Diaspora

This line studies the formation of societies, cultures and identities in Africa and the African diaspora in Americas, their transformations and the connections established in the Atlantic world. The research conducted by the line comprise the study of African and Afro-descendants (African cults of affliction, Christianity, candomblé, umbanda); African and diasporic identities (social, political and gender); the different forms of exploitation of African labor (enslaved, forced, paid); the construction of representations of African and Africans in the diaspora (through travel writings, memories, literature); the different forms of struggle in Africa and Americas (escape, quilombo, insurrection, independence movements); analysis of customary and positive law (customs, colonial laws, constitutions); and the construction of racism and racialization in African and diasporic societies. The line also includes the study of the formation of political and intellectual networks of contestation of colonial states, their relations with national liberation movements and post-independence social struggles. 

Area 4: Culture, Memory and Visualities

This area of concentration is dedicated to the production of historical knowledge in its themes and multiple times, considering memory, visuality and culture as dimensions constitutive of the social. The theoretical-methodological perspective contemplated include the transformations in the historiographic field (connections, transits, discontinuities), the plurality of perspectives (Visual Studies, Studies of Heritages and Public Archeology, Cultural, Intellectual and Environmental History), inter-disciplinarity in fields like memory, studies of images, subjectivities, gender, discourses, narratives and the incorporation of repertoires that problematize the historical knowledge and its meanings in the contemporary world.  The area considers the transforming power of the historiographic analysis, acknowledging that the work of historians is marked by their subjectivity, be the forms of writing History and historicization of happenings.

4.1) Gender, Subjectivity and Material Culture

This line of research approaches themes and problematizes matters connected to the production of subjectivity, sexuality, feminisms and environment, from the perspective of Cultural History, artistic expression and material culture.  It investigates the historical forms of power and counter-power manifestations, articulating them with the concepts of class, gender, ethnicity and race as social constructions.  It promotes reflections on the historicity of cultures and our present in their multiple time and space layers, like in critical analyses of neoliberalism, socio-environmental collapses and crises, as well as the investigation of ruptures, insurgencies and counter-conducts in collective and individual practices. The line works on the Material Culture, considered a new field of historical investigation, useful for studies on Classical Antiquity, as well as for studies related to Modernity and Post-Modernity.  It proposes reflection on the contemporaneity understood as capitalism’s crisis phase, incorporating, on the one hand, the critic of representation and the mediating function of images, and, on the other hand, the critic of work and socialization of the value. It develops and encourages historical research on material culture, radical social, cultural and political movements in the 20th and 21th centuries, poetics and feminist practices, studies on counterculture and also the historical processes of socio-environmental degradation and regression that are notably speeding up in the last half century.

4.2) Visualities, Memory Policies and Contemporary Matters

The line, in its multiplicity, proposes historiographic approaches based on themes that express representational mobilities in contemporary history and in the present time.  Historical researches have incorporated discussions, procedures and propositions that re-affirm the political, social and cultural function of the writing of History and its critical potential in the public debate. Denaturalizing speeches, questioning legitimations and institutionalities, understanding and criticizing dynamics of silencing and invisibilities, inquiring about subjects, voices and perspectives are basic principles of the historical knowledge practiced in this line. Among its fields, it investigates the relations involving memory policies, oblivions, erasing, and re-significations, seeking to understand the act of preservation – and destruction – as connected to practices, institutions, actors, uses and clashes on the materialities and intangible dimensions of cultural assets, whether in the field of studies of heritage, or in the field of visual studies, in the dimension of intellectual and cultural history, in studies on landscapes and the conformation on public spaces and domesticity.    Such procedures are configured by governabilities, influenced by institutions, communities, construction of subjectivities, intellectual debates, protocols and sanctions of values and meanings, desires and convictions. This condensation of meanings in images, memory policies, heritages and intellectual debates instigates history and is entangled to a game of times and local, regional and global dynamics.  The questions on the contemporary world exceed the time frame and leads to the understanding of space-time themes and logics that include the present time, the flows and interconnections involving classical themes, asymmetries, homogenizations and developments of singular and collective experiences in multiple scales. It is about observing how these time relations are articulated, from which the present derives and participates, providing the study of historical temporalities and their agency. The themes in this line of research involve the social dimension of intellectual practices, the historically constituted visual representations and the reflection on the plural manifestations of heritages. The line seeks to understand the strategies of memory, the historicity of concepts and the construction of the landscape and intellectual, visual, social and cultural routes.