(Auto)imagens de uma historiadora por escrito : memória, experiência e formação na trajetória de Maria Efigênia Lage de Resende

Abstract

This research has as its central issue the intellectual trajectory of Maria Efigênia Lage de Resende, exploring her connections with experiences that shaped the field of historiographical production in her time. The memorialist nature of her academic production is the main axis of this investigation, making it possible to question models, identities, practices, and regimes that ended up organizing her (self)image and, to a certain extent, orienting her gaze towards the past. This study intends to make legible the way she invested in the construction of her (self)image as a historian, which will be executed by considering different scales, extending from her trajectory to the institutions through which she passed and the constraints of history as a disciplinary field. When thinking about her trajectory as a historiographical issue, we take the professional practice of historians as an object of reflection, granting relevance to the historicity of the forms of production and circulation of historical knowledge and their models of action in the second half of the twentieth century, as well as to the relationship between teaching and researching, memory and historiography, narrative and experience. We support the idea that her authority as a historian was based not only on texts written on specific historical themes, but also on institutional rites, practices, memorial productions and, mainly, on the elaboration of a recognizable and shared (self)image. This diversity of operations gave rise to historical research, but also to a specific historical experience immersed in symbolic practices that produced the conditions for her recognition – such as those “staged” in her academic memorial. After all, what do historians' self-images say about historical studies?