02/21/2024
By Monica Melo

The Saab Center for Portuguese Studies, in partnership with the Department of History and World Languages and Cultures, announces a lecture "O Povo de Salazar:" Letters of Ordinary Citizens to the Dictator in the Period of Late Salazarism by Duncan Simpson. 

Join us on Wednesday, Feb. 28 at 5:15 p.m. in OLE 528 or via Zoom.

The lecture examines over 400 letters sent spontaneously to the Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar by common citizens in the mid-1960s. Using the methods of everyday life history and history from below, the letters provide a vivid point of access to the social history of the period (both urban and rural), to the multifaceted popular perceptions of Salazar, and to the strategies set in place by the authorities to turn this type of correspondence into an efficient mode of social control at the micro level.

Duncan Simpson is FLAD Visiting Professor in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University. He is a research fellow at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais at the University of Lisbon. He gained his PhD at King’s College London. His doctoral thesis examined the relations between the Catholic Church and the Salazar dictatorship. He is the author of two books and numerous book chapters and articles. As a Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon (ICS-UL) from 2019 to 2021, he completed a history of the Salazarist political police “from below,” combining the methodologies of oral history, opinion surveying, and archival research.

This event is free and open to the public

For more information, email Prof. Frank F. Sousa.