Biography

Augusta da Silveira de Oliveira is a historian of gender and sexuality in modern Latin America. She holds a BA and MA from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) and recently completed her PhD in History at Brown University. Her dissertation, "Entendidas or Women in the Know: Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century Brazil", challenges the myth of lesbian invisibility by showing how women forged relationships that negotiated the boundaries between privacy and visibility while confronting social and state repression.

Drawing on literature, medical and legal records, press sources, and oral history interviews, her research places lesbian history at the centre of broader debates about race, class, and citizenship in modern Brazil. Her work received Brown University’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies Dissertation Prize and an Honourable Mention from the CLAGS Fellowship at the City University of New York. Augusta is also a co-founder of the Arquivo Lésbico Brasileiro (Brazilian Lesbian Archive), a public history initiative and community archive dedicated to preserving historical records of lesbian life in Brazil.

As a Max Weber Fellow, she will revise her dissertation into a book manuscript, prepare a journal article on representations of women’s sexual dissidence in Brazil’s early twentieth-century satirical press, and lay the groundwork for a new project examining the intersections of gender, authoritarianism and environmental history during the final years of the Brazilian military dictatorship.

Mentor

• Benno Bastian, Gammerl

Mentor

• Monika, Baar