Livingstone Undergraduate Research Award in the Humanities
Livingstone Undergraduate Research Award in the Humanities
Igor M. Piovezan
Coming Out Under a Dictatorship: The Rise of the Early Gay Liberation Movement in Brazil Through O Lampião da Esquina, 1978–1981
View Igor's project online
This project analyses all 38 issues of O Lampião da Esquina to understand the relationship between the Brazilian Gay Liberation Movement and other social movements in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I find that connections between leftist political groups and the burgeoning gay identity movement were riddled with tensions as political activists and gay Liberation proponents struggled over how to prioritize a variety of interests in an era of centralized repression.
What is your major and expected year of graduation?
I am a history and global studies double major with a concentration in global security. I also have a Spanish minor.
What inspired you to pursue your project?
One of my passions is to study the experiences of minority groups living under authoritarian regimes. I find it fascinating to see that even under such harsh circumstances, people had the courage to fight to be who they were. During my sophomore year, I wrote a paper on the birth of the Gay Liberation Movement during the Weimar Republic, and it left me wondering how the movement for gay rights started in my own country, which led me to this project.
What does winning this award mean to you?
It means a lot to me to see Brazilian Queer History recognized by the Livingstone Award. It is a topic still not very present in the scholarship, so I hope that with awards like these I will be able to inspire others to address the many unanswered questions regarding the Brazilian Gay Liberation Movement.
How did the Libraries support your research?
Temple Libraries was central to my project. It’s where I found most of my sources and the librarians were valuable resources that pointed me in the right direction. I also benefited from the Special Collections, which contained many issues of Gay Sunshine, the American publication which inspired the newspaper I am looking at in this project.
Igor Piovezan is a historian with a keen ability to identify core issues from the past. His prize-winning paper evaluates a set of magazines that sparked a generational shift in gay rights in Brazil. By connecting digitized primary sources to a wide range of sources through Temple Libraries, Igor has been able to tell a story of how gay identities developed in a particular Brazilian context without losing sight of how this process was connected to a transnational movement for gay liberation. Igor’s ability to narrate this history through thoughtful analysis and compelling prose speaks to his promise as a scholar.
—Eileen Ryan, Associate Professor, College of Liberal Arts
This category covers research methods in the humanities (in both traditional and digital forms). Disciplines represented include such fields as Art History, Classics, Literature, Film Studies, Linguistics and Languages, History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies. Much of the scholarly output in the humanities relies upon traditional library research methods using primary and secondary sources, though the specific source types consulted will vary from discipline to discipline.
This award is generously sponsored by John H. Livingstone, SBM ’49.