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Department of History

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Helen B. Kampmann

Title: Graduate Students
PhD in History, with concentration in Latin American History
Department: History
College of Arts and Sciences
Email: bertoleh@email.sc.edu

Advisor: Matt Childs

Education: BA in Architecture and Urbanism from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in 2004.
MA in Art History from USC in 2018

Bio: My major research interests include inter-disciplinary approaches that deal with material culture, architecture, art, women and gender studies, and digital history. My dissertation will examine the material culture that women with different social and economic statuses, ethnicities and cultures produced in nineteenth-century Brazil. I am particularly interested in the conflicts and confluences between women of distinct backgrounds under the nineteenth-century Brazilian patriarchal society. I want to investigate how women’s encounters, particularly their exchange of knowledge and experiences, reproduced and/or challenged prevalent power structures and whether this struggle is apparent in the material culture they left.

For my Masters in Public History, I will develop a digital project using network analysis and graph theory to analyze the complex network of the Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720 -1778). I will build on my Masters’ thesis, entitled “Unlocking Piranesi’s Prisons,” in which I analyzed the sixteen etchings that compose the publication Carceri d’Invenzione (1761), or Imaginary Prisons. Using Piranesi’s outstanding web of referentialities, I want to provide a visual evidence for Marguerite Yourcenar’s statement that “all the eighteenth-century angles of incidence and reflection intersect in the strange linear universe of Giovanni Battista Piranesi," revealing, therefore, his central role in the artistic and cultural production of the Settecento in Europe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Challenge the conventional. Create the exceptional. No Limits.

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