Lucas Avelar
Ph.D. Candidate
Contact
Department of History
Office: Hardin Hall 203
Website: http://lucas-avelar.com/
Schedule an Appointment: https://fantastical.app/ldavela/office-hours
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; Latin America; Digital Methods; U.S. Foreign Relations; Memory Studies; Identity/Nationalism; Cultural History.
Luc Avelar is a Ph.D. Candidate specializing in U.S.-Latin American relations at the turn of the twentieth century with an emphasis on issues of place-making, cultural representations, empire building, and national identity. He currently teaches U.S. History to 1877 as an Instructor of Record in the Department of History and Geography. His dissertation research employs digital methodologies to unveil the spatial and rhetorical representations of Pan-Americanism during world's fairs in the context of broader U.S. imperialist agenda for the hemisphere. By investigating the role of international expositions as spaces of cultural negotiation between imagined core and peripheries of the American empire, Avelar also explores how those events informed how U.S. Americans navigated ever-changing notions of foreignness and domesticity in the wake of a modernizing world.
Luc served as one of the Andrew W. Mellon Data Fellows with the digital history project Freedom On The Move at Cornell University in 2024. He was also accepted to the inaugural Archives as Data Summer Institute in 2023, a joint project of Columbia University’s History Lab and Columbia Libraries funded by the NEH Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities.
Before coming to Clemson, Luc earned his MA in Public History and Historic Preservation from Colorado State University and a BA in History from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. In Colorado, he worked as an archives technician intern with the USDA's National Wildlife Research Center and a GIS intern with the Geospatial Centroid at CSU.
