Lucas “Luc” Avelar is a Digital History Ph.D. student at Clemson University and the current Project Data Manager for Mapping the Gay Guides. 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.
As part of the inaugural cohort of the Digital History Ph.D. Program at Clemson University, Luc is currently engaging with methodologies of digital humanities and geographic information systems to further expand his research on the intersections between space and time in urban and cultural landscapes.
