João R. M. Ohara

My Translation Experiments

Last year and the year before I studied some translation theory and decided it was time for me to practice a new skill. In this post I would like to share some of the wonderful texts I received authorization to translate. Conscious of my own limitations, I am always open to criticism, observations, and other tips on translation theory and practice. Papers (from English to Portuguese) Teses sobre Teoria e História, by Ethan Kleinberg, Joan W. Scott, and Gary Wilder, translated with Andre de Lemos Freixo (UFOP), from their Theory Revolt manifesto Blog posts (from English to Portuguese) Mercados de…

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by Ohara

“Introduction to Contemporary Issues in Historical Theory”, my elective course for 2019

My current postdoc position does not have teaching duties. Nevertheless, I have talked to my supervisor and we decided it would be nice for me to offer an elective for undergrads this semester. So I drafted a syllabus and started working on a course that I think I would have liked to have during my time as an undergrad. You can check the final syllabus by clicking here (in Portuguese only, though). 44 students have enrolled in my course. Sure, understanding most of the “contemporary issues” in historical theory/philosophy of history requires some background knowledge on “perennial issues” that most…

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by Ohara

A Catalog of History Dissertations, part 2

Data on history dissertations from the old days is tricky to deal with. The existing analog catalogs are not always complete and often contain incorrect information. And while university libraries have incorporated these dissertations to their online catalogs, each library has done so with varying degrees of precision, depending on many variables. After considering some alternatives, I have decided to manually check for names and titles when possible (I will write about this in a later post). So then we come to the problem of how to store and make available all the data. My first option was to use…

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by Ohara

A Catalog of History Dissertations

My current postdoc project consists in building a large database with (meta)data for all History PhD and MA dissertations defended in Brazil from 1942 to 2000. It has been a while since the last one was published, and the data from the Ministry of Education are inconsistent (to say the least) for entries older than the 2000’s. As a historian of historiography, this inconsistency has made me waste much time trying to cross-check information about specific dissertations – and I know many colleagues who had to do all the same things for their own works. So I decided to bring…

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by Ohara

New Website

I have just reset and restarted the website so I could post about my project updates. For the time being I’ll start sharing some details on the database I’m currently working on, as well as some other parallel works. My goal is to reach colleagues which would not be able to follow this content if it was in Portuguese – and maybe even learn how to write better in the process. Thank you for your visit, and see you all soon.

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