Tadeusz Manteuffel
Institute of History
Polish Academy of Sciences
Warsaw/Poland
Imperial commoners of Brazil and West Africa (1640-1822): global history from a correspondence network perspective
National Science Center of Poland: 2022/45/B/HS3/00473
Principal Investigator (2023-2027)
Webiste: projectmape.org
Our project aims to investigate the communication patterns of imperial commoners within the Atlantic Portuguese Empire, including their shared characteristics, narratives, and thinking strategies that transcended class and gender boundaries. We will examine how the Empire responded to these attitudes through our unique dataset, which consists of almost 170,000 administrative correspondence records between Lisbon and its Atlantic colonies. This allows us to view the empire as a dynamic space built on networks and bottom-up communication.
To achieve our goals, we will develop a dictionary of entities such as people, organizations, and locations identified in the corpus and utilize topic models to extract semantic information. By analyzing the topics of political, administrative, economic, religious, and other concerns expressed in these letters, we will gain insight into the experiences of non-elite residents across different regions and time periods.
Our use of cutting-edge technology offers innovative perspectives on the history of the Portuguese Empire and sheds light on colonial social networks. Our research will provide valuable insights for academic communities studying the history of the Portuguese Empire or transatlantic power structures.
Collaborators of this project are Dr. Demival Vasques Filho (Leibniz Institute of European History – IEG, Germany), Dr. Michal Bojanowski (Kozminski University, Poland), Juciene Cardoso (Federal University of Campina Grande) and Clodomir Santana (PosDoc in this project).
DARIAH-PL - Research infrastructure for the arts and humanities
Research Assistant (2022-currenty)
Webiste: Dariah.lab
DARIAH-PL is a development project funded under the Smart Growth Operational Programme 2014-2020 in the area „Development of modern research infrastructure of the science sector” with an objective to build a research infrastructure for digital humanities. The infrastructure has been placed on the Polish Research Infrastructure Map in the area of social sciences and humanities. It is designed to acquire, store and integrate cultural data from the humanities and social sciences, as well as to process, visualize, and share digital resources.
Project objectives
The aim of the project is to build Dariah.lab infrastructure which includes hardware and software tools using state-of-the-art technological solutions and integrated digital resources from various fields of humanities and arts sciences. The network of distributed research laboratories constituting Dariah.lab is designed on the basis of a research agenda developed by the consortium members. It consistes of Source Laboratory, Automatic Enrichement Laboratory, Supervised Semantic Discovery Laboratory, Intelligent Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory, and Advanced Visualization Laboratory.
Travessias – Enciclopédia de Artes, Literatura e Ciências (2022-currently)
Participant (2022-currently)
The Travessias project - Encyclopedia of Arts, Literature and Sciences: The Legacy of Nazi-Fascism Refugees is proposed by Professor Maria Luiza Tucci Carneiro, coordinator of LEER-USP, in collaboration with excellent academic researchers. The aim is to create an educational digital platform that facilitates research and distance learning with audiovisual resources. Travessias will also have a printed version as a reference work to be published in thematic volumes by the University of São Paulo's publishing house. The proposal is to identify and promote the legacy of artists, intellectuals and scientists (Jewish and non-Jewish) who, fleeing the violence perpetrated by National Socialists and their collaborators in Europe, found refuge in Brazil from 1933 onwards. Using a cross-reference format, the project intends to reconstruct the trajectories and productions of these distinct groups by their nationalities, professions, and multiple areas of knowledge.
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Through the educational digital platform Travessias - Encyclopedia of Arts, Literature, and Sciences, we aim to contribute to the recognition and dissemination of the legacy of artists, intellectuals, and scientists (Jewish and non-Jewish) who chose to live in Brazil from 1933 onwards, fleeing the Nazi-fascist violence. Their life trajectories will be treated as records of an exemplary memory that, according to Bulgarian philosopher and linguist Tzvetan Todorov, is active and useful to the present, in an attempt to convey a message of repudiation to hate speeches and racist state policies. Thus, we intend to produce knowledge that expresses the life trajectories of refugees and analyze the cultural/scientific productions of this distinct group as refugees, exiles, immigrants, many of whom are Holocaust survivors. By describing past injustices through the entries, we aim to revive the ideals of justice and freedom, which are so valuable to the democratic rule of law.
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*Text from the homepage of the Project Travessias
CzÅ‚owiek twórcÄ… historii
Eng: Humans Shaping the course of history
Nr NdS/536174/2021/2021)
Participant (2022-currenty)
The integration and cooperation of historians from dozens of research centers across Poland is the main goal of the project conducted by the University of Białystok. The result of their joint efforts will be a 6-volume publication to be presented at the XXI Congress of Polish Historians in 2024.
The initiators of the project are Prof. Cezary Kuklo and Dr. Wojciech Walczak from the Faculty of History and International Relations at the University of Białystok. The main goal of the project is to highlight current research needs in the broadly understood humanities. It is intended to be an inspiration for further research in the field of humanities, as well as for cooperation between researchers from different disciplines and scientific centers.
223 scientists, mainly from the fields of history, but also history of art, history of medicine, history of science, social sciences, political science and international relations, will participate in the project. They represent 25 of the most important scientific centers in our country and 5 foreign centers dealing with the history of Poland. The results of their work will be published in 6 volumes and presented at the XXI Congress of Polish Historians in Białystok in 2024.
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*Text from the Forum Akademickie
The Portuguese overseas identity in the context of the social network analysis
National Science Center of Poland: 2017/27/N/HS3/01104
Principal Investigator (2018-2021)
The project aimed to analyze the Portuguese overseas identity in the Atlantic Ocean basin during 1642-1755 using Social Network Analysis. The research verified the connections between the administrative structures and the inhabitants of the colonial outskirts. The overseas identity was regarded as result of different relationships formed between diverse social actors. In this research, we combined the history of the Portuguese colonial empire with modern tools, which are scarce research methods in the existing historiography in Poland and the Portuguese-speaking regions. This provided an innovative approach to understanding the Portuguese empire from a broader perspective, analyzing it as a system of colonial interconnections.
Bolsas de Investigação para Estrangeiros - Research Grants for Foreigners
Scholarship holder (2016-2017)
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Webiste: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian
I was awarded a scholarship by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation to conduct research in Lisbon, Portugal for a couple of months. This grant was specifically aimed at supporting foreign researchers pursuing a doctoral degree in the field of the history of Portugal and Portuguese-speaking countries. The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation is dedicated to promoting and supporting various fields of knowledge, art, and culture, and is known for its contributions to education and research around the world.