Yesterday, the Foundation for Science and Technology announced the results of the competition for project funding and the IHC saw two of its projects approved: Burning landscapes, coordinated by Miguel Carmo, and Censorship(s), coordinated by Rita Luís.

With global funding close to 250 thousand euros, the project Burning landscapes: A political and environmental history of the large wildfires in Portugal (1950-2020) has as its primary objective to study the extraordinary history of rural fires in Portugal. Unlike what happens with the ecology of fires, the historical processes that underlie the current regime of large fires, such as the connections between fires and the political economy of forest plantations, are unknown.

Miguel Carmo recently won a postdoctoral research fellowship in an international competition promoted by the IHC. Winning this project now reinforces the importance of environmental history at the IHC, within the framework of the research group in History, Territory, and Environment, as well as the thematic line ‘Precarious Worlds and Sustainability‘, coordinated by Ana Isabel Queiroz, also co-coordinator of Carmo’s project.

Rita Luís’ project, Censorship(s): an analytical model of censorship processes, starts from a functional question: how does the censorship system work? With this issue in mind, the aim of the project is to create a comprehensive analytical model, including the production, circulation and reception/consumption aspects, as well as the broad and heterogeneous silencing mechanisms. The case study will be the Portuguese authoritarian regime of the Estado Novo (1933-1974). Exploratory in nature, this project will receive funding of approximately 50 thousand euros.

Rita Luís was, until mid-2021, coordinator of the research group on Culture, Identities, and Power and has been a member of the IHC Board since May. With a Junior Investigator contract already funded by the FCT, she will now be able to reinforce her individual investigation work on censorship in the Iberian Peninsula. She shares the project coordination with Rui Lopes, coordinator of the IHC’s thematic line ‘Modern Mediations’.