Varia Historia is published by the History Graduate Program, Faculdade de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, print version ISSN 0104-8775, online version ISSN 1982-4343.
Our mission is to publish original and innovative articles on history, promoting dialogues among members of the international academic community, and contributing to the historiographical renewal.
Contact: Av. Antonio Carlos, 6627, Pampulha Campus, Federal University of Minas Gerais,
Faculdade de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas, sala 4144, 31.270-901, Brazil. Email: variahis@gmail.com
Call for Papers - Special Issues
Starting in 2024, special issues will be published in continuous format.
The proposals selected for the coming years will receive contributions until the deadlines indicated below. Each special issue will feature a presentation by the organizers, to be written after all relevant articles have been approved.
The deadline for submissions for all 2024 Special Issues has been extended until April 30
2024
Connected History: Digital Innovations in the Production of Historical Knowledge
Guest editors: Maria Cristina Correia Leandro Pereira (Universidade de São Paulo, Brasil)
Sylvie Joye (Université de Lorraine, França)
Deadline for submissions: April 30, 2024
The computer tools developed over the last decades have been changing the way we think about and produce historical knowledge, and studies of ancient societies bear exemplary witness to this. Manuscripts that were once inaccessible are now available with just a few clicks; documentary editions, once impossible to find in Brazilian libraries, are now made available for download on specialized websites; even cutting-edge bibliographical productions, often restricted to a very selective circle of publications, can now be found on file-sharing platforms fueled by the authors themselves.
The special issue Connected History: Digital Innovations in the Production of Historical Knowledge is placed within this scenario of profound transformations. The goal is to bring together initiatives that are not limited to the use of computers as mere research aids, but that instead utilize them to expand the horizons of knowledge about the historical objects under analysis.
We welcome contributions that address digital theoretical topics, reports of computer projects (such as those aimed at managing and dealing with large volumes of data), research that has used and/or developed specific technological resources to deal with the particularities of a specific type of document (e.g., iconographic or archaeological), digital initiatives in the field of history teaching at all school levels (from elementary schools to higher education), or any other subject of interest to historians using digital methods.
Therefore, this call for papers seeks to gather researchers and projects that are exploring the possibilities offered by computer tools to deepen historical knowledge, creating a space for debate and idea-sharing that promotes innovation and advancement in the field of historical studies. We believe that the intelligent use of digital technologies can offer new perspectives, methods, and approaches to understand and interpret the past, thus enriching our understanding of ancient societies and their connections to the present.
Slavery, Everyday life, and Dynamics of Miscegenation in the Iberian World (16th-18th Centuries):
Spaces, Mobility, Agreements and Conflicts
Guest editors: Eduardo Corona Pérez (Universidad de Sevilla, Espanha)
Javier Fernández Martín (Universidad de Sevilla, Espanha)
Deadline for submissions: April 30, 2024
This special issue brings together specialists from various countries to address the daily life of the slave societies of the Iberian worlds, with the aim of delving into the spaces and forms of sociability that developed in them. The challenge that is proposed is to attend to the episodes of negotiation and conflict, situations of mobility, coexistence and overlapping, as well as the discourses and representations that served to distinguish or rank those societies. For this, articles are presented that, framed in the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies of the 16th-18th centuries, incorporate lines of research such as:
Reconstruction of individual and family trajectories.
Constitution and typology of “mestiçadas” families.
World of work and economic activities.
Conformation of sociability and solidarity networks on a regional and global scale.
Forms of access to freedom.
Participation in civil and ecclesiastical litigation.
Political speeches and representations.
Devotions and religious life.
Material culture and cultural and artistic dimensions.
Connected-compared perspectives.
The contributions, original and unpublished, are based on a solid documentary base, a methodological and conceptual body that tries to recover, use, and situate words and their meanings in time to understand historically, and a critical apparatus that discusses and problematizes the results obtained with the most recent historiographical debates on the issue. The inclusion of distant geographical spaces and in a long-range time arc allows an approach to the daily life of Iberian slaves societies from different times and spaces. Because these, despite being framed in global processes, had their own local and regional specificities. In this way, we hope that the dossier offers a more complex vision of the slavery, of the everyday life and of the dynamics of miscegenation in the Iberian worlds of the XVI-XVIII centuries.
Textual forms, Imagination, and Historicity
Guest editors: Patrícia da Silva Reis Marques (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil)
André Jobim Martins (Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil)
Clarissa Mattos (Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil)
Deadline for submissions: April 30, 2024
Since the mid-20th century, the historical discipline has been facing an array of challenges presented by the social sciences, the philosophy of language, and (post)structuralist theories, which have led to a reassessment of its epistemological premises, especially concerning the form of historiographical discourse as an intersection between the real and attempts to integrate it into narrative. Particularly emblematic of this juncture was the publication of Metahistory by Hayden White (1973), a work that stimulated a deeper interrogation of the textual status of history and of the relationships between historiography and literary fiction. That moment was not, however, an unprecedented "awakening" of history and the humanities to the intertwinings between problems of textual form and knowledge of reality – to cite just one prominent example, in his famous commentary on Genesis and the Odyssey in Mimesis (1946), Erich Auerbach already contrasted the modes of representing reality in texts in parallel with their respective "worlds of forms," pointing to the necessary solidarity between the creative and expressive possibilities of human beings and the concrete configuration of the lifeworld. These are the questions that drive the works featured in the special issue entitled Textual Forms, Imagination, and Historicity.
This call for papers is directed at works relevant to the following mutually supportive thematic axes: i) relationships between history, fiction, and literature; ii) the literary and epistemological status of research and writing forms in the humanities and social sciences; iii) issues relevant to the redefinition of the historical discipline and the literary field amidst challenges posed by contemporary experience; iv) objections and questions raised against traditional historical and/or literary representations and the need for re-elaboration or radical modification of historical and memory narratives in the face of limit events and experiences involving traumas..
2025
Oral History and Public History: Debates and trends
Guest editors: Tatyana de Amaral Maia (Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, Brasil / Universidade do Porto, Portugal)
Alessandro Casellato (Università Ca' Foscari, Itália)
Deadline for submissions: March 31, 2025
This special issue collects articles that resulted from research on the new possibilities for building historical knowledge in the context of oral history and public history studies in Latin American and Southern European countries. The authors aim to understand to what extent and how the relationship between public history and oral history can actually contribute to the production of historical knowledge.
We accept research dealing with the relationship between oral history and public history, as well as works “on” oral history and public history or “about” oral history and public history, such as: the public history movement and its relationships with the oral history movement; oral sources in the writing of history and in its communicating; oral history and social demands in the present time; oral history and digital culture; oral history and migrations in the present time; oral history, public history, and the pandemic; oral history and memory; oral history and public history in laboratories and research groups at Iberian American and Southern Europe universities and research institutes.
Another an additional approach is the construction and use of the category “public history” in different countries: why did some countries, for instance, Italy adopt the term in English, while others, such as Brazil, translate it (história pública)? To what extent did such uses influence the different ways of explaining this polysemic movement?
Politics, Society, and Labor in Colonial Frontiers of Indigenous America:
Portuguese America and New Spain, 16th-19th centuries
Guest editors: Gustavo Velloso (Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brasil)
Manuel Méndez Alonzo (Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Espanha)
Deadline for submissions: March 31, 2025
One of the main current challenges for scholars of American indigenous peoples is to promote investigations whose analytical perspectives go beyond the geographic frameworks corresponding exclusively to each American nation states of the last two centuries. This implies an openness of historians to the observation of Amerindian universes in their own terms, logics and complexities and reconsidering nationalist bias delimitations, synthesized in expressions such as “Indians of Brazil”, “Indigenous populations of Mexico”, “natives of Peru” etc. Particularly, it is necessary to pay attention to the simultaneities and eventual connections between different historical realities of contact and interaction, and between indigenous and non-indigenous social groups of Early Modernity, paying attention comparatively to their differences, similarities, eventual and/or probable interconnections. Such analysis would favor our studies within broader social and cultural contexts – including those of a continental dimension.
In this sense, this dossier will host articles that cover different subjects of the social experience of Native American populations from the 16th to the 19th century, such as normativity, work, migrations, demography, forms of installation in space, trade, education, diplomacy, war activity, among others. These contributions mainly focus on jurisdictional spaces of Portuguese America and the viceroyalty of New Spain by comparing possible articulations and common historical conjunctures between these spaces.
Varia Historia accepts submissions at any time (see Instructions).
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