Jim Suals

In 2015, I earned a master’s degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. To support my research and studies, I obtained two academic-year FLAS Fellowships and a Tinker Foundation grant for exploratory fieldwork. My thesis, “Urban Cowboys,” examined contemporary connections between the state of Rio Grande do Sul’s past, regional myths, and ideas of the nation.

At Pitt, I have continued to study Latin American history generally and Brazilian history specifically. Recently, I completed another master’s, titled “Pursuing Pleasures in Brazil: Anxieties & Ambitions in Lampião da Esquina (1978-81),” which investigated the discourse of pleasure and revolution during the waning years of the military dictatorship. As general resistance to the dictatorship increased, readers and writers in the magazine argued that pleasure was the bases for any successful revolution.

Currently, I am crafting a dissertation proposal that pivots my focus from the discourse of pleasure-as-resistance to include the ways in which the military and other social groups, too, employed the power of pleasure. I seek to demonstrate how concerns about and promotions of pleasure in the 20th century not only shaped a nation, but also impacted regional and hemispheric relations.