Lucas Avelar

Ph.D. Student

Contact
Department of History
Website: http://lucasavelar.org/
Email: ldavela@clemson.edu

Education
B.A., Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (2019); M.A., Colorado State University (2022)

Research Interests
United States, 1877-1920; Digital Methods; World/Global/Transnational; Memory Studies; Identity/Nationalism; Urban.

Lucas “Luc” Avelar is a Ph.D. student, graduate research assistant, and the current Project Data Manager for the Mapping the Gay Guides Project. He investigates issues of spatial history, place-making, cultural identity, and memory studies. Lucas holds an MA in Public History and Historic Preservation from Colorado State University. His thesis entitled “Invented Pasts, Imagined Futures: World’s Fairs, Cities, and Narratives of Brazilian Nationhood in the Built Environment, 1893-1976” dealt with the maturation of Brazil’s modern nationhood in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries by examining the spatial narratives of world’s fairs as microcosms of modernity and ideologies of national identity.

Before coming to the United States, Lucas received his BA in History from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Still in Brazil, he built up extensive experience in different areas of the historical profession, including museum interpretation, curatorship, archival research, and teaching. Before attending Clemson University, Lucas worked an internship as an archive technician and research assistant with the Public Lands History Center in collaboration with the USDA’s National Wildlife Research Center. He was also a GIS intern with the Geospatial Centroid in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he worked in partnership with the Larimer County Department of Natural Resources.

As part of the inaugural cohort of the Digital History Ph.D. Program, Lucas engages with geographic information systems and other digital methodologies to further expand his research on the intersections between space and time in urban and cultural landscapes.