[janet gunter]

Last week I was remembering an undergrad professor of mine to my partner. He was a Portuguese historian called Diogo Ramada Curto. I hadn't had much contact with Portuguese people at this point in my life, and he was such a warm introduction. I can still see his bright smile, his eager body language in the classroom, his eyes light up.

He was leading a course on global empires. I remember him being keenly interested in the dozen or so students as individuals, as people. Even at an institution where this was not unusual, it didn't feel normal in a history seminar of this nature. To be fair, up until this point, I'd taken mostly lecture-style history courses so I didn't have a frame of reference. But I felt intuitively that history was for very serious, bookish men of a certain type. His interest in us as people was, well, kind of “disarming” for lack of a better word.

He was interested in our intellectual development. I remember him asking very personal questions like “tell us about a moment that served as a rupture in your education”.

I'd never heard this word used in this way. And I understood that he wanted to know how reading and learning changed us as people, in ways that might change the way we inhabit the world. While he loved theory, it seemed this was grounded in what it could do, not just for its sake.

To be honest, taking Diogo's class was a rupture for me. He taught in a place where social history was the main attraction, where we read (and really enjoyed!) books about, say, the lives of Afroperuvian washer women in Lima in the 17C. I learned historiography from him, like about what “durée” meant, and how Fernand Braudel had completely shaken up the historical establishment with his works inspired by the “longue durée”. While we're often taught to think in terms of definitive events or periods of a decade, Braudel and his mates were concerned with economic and political processes that played out over centuries influenced by geography, space and climate.

So thinking about history in terms of world systems, and shifts in these systems, was an amazing development for me. And it grounded my major in “development studies” which was basically political economy of economic development in the present moment.

He also taught us that unconventional people produced quality historic scholarship. Braudel himself had a quite unusual trajectory. Diogo rated Charles Boxer, an auto-didact historian who we read at length on Asia. In retrospect, this is part of the reason I felt permission to apply for an independent Fulbright to study colonial Portuguese Timor in Lisbon, with no affiliation to a university and no set plan to become an historian.

I was super sad then, to read a couple of days ago, about Diogo's untimely death at the age of 66. I thought of his family; I thought of Ondine, a similarly vibrant friend I lost last year at age 65.

But I was also comforted by reading how he'd returned to Portugal, and shaken up the establishment after some years in the US and other European countries.

After taking his undergrad course, during my Fulbright, I later learned about the Portuguese establishment from my time living there, and I spent a good deal of time at the National Library, which he had recently taken the helm of. I knew how set in their ways and how deferential to seniority many are.

I read in his obituary how he kindly but firmly challenged some of the most canonical historians and their work (heralded in the headline as “anti-conformist”), and how he continued his humanistic focus on the intellectual development of the next generation.

His take on history centres our agency here and now – my translation of quote cited in his Público obituary

I really struggle to accept that there are lessons to be drawn from history. People taking malicious advantage of them are greater in number than the reverse. History as a vocation, as a way of investigating and disseminating these conclusions serves, above all, as a way of liberating ourselves from the past... History is not the tutor of life; it's life that is the tutor of history.

What's more, he had an irreverent disrespect for disciplinary boundaries. And as somebody who was asked to choose sides during my Lisbon masters defence: whether I had written a history or anthropology thesis, I can appreciate his belief that history was too important to be left to the historians.

I know it might sound twee, but I really feel compelled to say that Diogo taught me that individuals and their love for others do make a profound difference in the world. Teaching makes a difference. Caring for the intellectual development of others – that is, meeting people where they are and truly listening to them, and provoking them when the time is right. In the age of generative AI, stunting the critical faculties of a new generation, I feel we need to heed the lessons of the Diogos of the world and live up to their legacy.