The Portuguese & Lusophone-world Lecture Series | 50th Anniversary of the Carnation Revolution

Join us on Thursday, April 25, 2024 at 6:00 PM for a special program at the New Bedford Whaling Museum to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Carnation Revolution. 

Duncan Simpson, PhD will offer a lecture on the Portuguese Society and Salazar’s Political Police (PIDE) Before and After the Revolution of 25 April 1974. A lite reception will follow at 7:00 PM.

Duncan Simpson is FLAD Visiting Professor in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University. He is a research fellow at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais at the University of Lisbon, Portugal.

Simpson gained his PhD at King's College London. His doctoral thesis examined the relations between the Catholic Church and the Salazar dictatorship. He is the author of two books and numerous book chapters and articles published in Britain, France, Brazil and Portugal.

As a Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon from 2019 to 2021, he completed a history of the Salazarist political police “from below,” combining the methodologies of oral history, opinion surveying, and archival research. In 2022 he was awarded an Individual Research Grant by Portugal’s national academic funding agency (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia). He is currently working on public letter-writing in Salazar´s Portugal between 1933 and 1974, focusing on the operation of dictatorial power at the micro level and the processes of clientelism.

Doors open at 5:30 PM, with program starting promptly at 6:00 PM in the Cook Memorial Theater. A lite cocktail reception will follow 7:00 to 8:00 PM in the Jacobs Family Gallery.