Letters to Lula in Detention: Epistolary Resistance and Writings on the Self

Speakers: Maud Chirio, Associate Professor of History, Université Gustave Eiffel; Ernesto Bohoslavsky, Lecturer, Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento
Moderated by: Sidney Chalhoub, Chair, Department of History; David and Peggy Rockefeller Professor of History and of African and African American Studies; Faculty Affiliate, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures

During his 580 days of political imprisonment, from April 2018 to November 2019, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva received more than 25,000 letters. This corpus is exceptional in several ways: it represents the choral testimony of an era of democratic crisis, and gives access to thousands of life stories, from the pen of common people who usually do not leave this kind of trace in history.

Maud Chirio is a historian, lecturer at the Université Gustave Eiffel since 2010, member of the ACP laboratory (EA 3350) and associate member of Mondes Américains. A former student of ENS (Paris), in 2009 she defended her doctorate in history, carried out under the supervision of Annick Lempérière, on the theme "Military policy. Revolts and mobilizations of officers under the Brazilian dictatorship (1961-1978)” (University Paris 1 - Panthéon Sorbonne).

Ernesto Bohoslavsky teaches Latin American History at Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento. His main research interest is the history of anti-Communism and other extreme-right ideologies in South America. In the last years he has reconstructed some of the Asian and Latin American anti-Communist networks during the Cold War. He has recently co-edited, with Olga Echeverría and Martin Vicente, the two volumes of Las derechas argentinas en el siglo XX (Tandil: Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, 2021).

Sidney Chalhoub taught history at the University of Campinas, Brazil, for thirty years. He moved to Harvard in July 2015. He has published three books on the social history of Rio de Janeiro: Trabalho, lar e botequim (1986), on working-class culture in the early twentieth century; Visões da liberdade (1990), on the last decades of slavery in the city; and Cidade febril (1996), on tenements and epidemics in the second half of the nineteenth century. He also published Machado de Assis, historiador (2003), about the literature and political ideas of the most important nineteenth-century Brazilian novelist, and co-edited five other books on the social history of Brazil. His most recent monograph is A força da escravidão: ilegalidade e costume no Brasil oitocentista (2012), on illegal enslavement and the precariousness of freedom in nineteenth-century Brazil. Chalhoub has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan (1995, 1999, 2004), a Tinker Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago (2007), and a research fellow at Stanford University (2010-11) and in the International Research Center “Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History” (Re:work) at Humbold Universität, Berlin (2013). He was a founder of and remains associated with the Centro de Pesquisa em História Social da Cultura (CECULT), University of Campinas.