Charles Edmondson Historical Lectures
The Charles Edmondson Historical Lectures, sponsored by the Department of History at Baylor University, are made possible by an endowment established by Dr. E. Bud Edmondson of Longview, Texas, to honor his father, Mr. Charles S. B. Edmondson. Baylor University and the Waco community are grateful to Dr. Edmondson for his generosity.
The Department of History will feature two free and open to the public events for our 2025 Edmondson Lecture Series, Mobilizing Morality, featuring Dr. Ben Cowan.
The lectures will be held on April 2nd and April 3rd at the Armstrong Browning Library, 710 Speight Ave. Waco, Texas 76706, in the Foyer of Meditation. Both lectures be held from 3:30 - 5:00 pm.
Dr. Ben Cowan received his BA from Harvard University and his MA and PhD from UCLA. His interest in right-wing radicalism, morality, sexuality, and 20th-century imperialism led him to focus on Cold War Brazil, with a specialization in the cultural and gender history of the post-1964 era. Dr. Cowan’s first book, Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) won three book awards, including the prestigious Brazil Section Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association. In 2021, Dr. Cowan published a second monograph, Moral Majorities across the Americas: Brazil, the United States, and the Creation of the Religious Right (also from UNC Press), which subsequently won the Roberto Reis Prize (Brazilian Studies Association) and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. He has published work in The Hispanic American Historical Review, Luso-Brazilian Review, American Quarterly, The Journal of the History of Sexuality, Radical History Review, Latin American Research Review, and other venues. Dr. Cowan is currently conducting research for a book on Latin American histories of mountaineering. His work has benefited grants from the John W. Kluge Center, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the American Philosophical Society, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Sensualism and Socialism: Tracing the Moral Currencies of the Cold War in Brazil and Beyond
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2025 | 3:30 - 5:00 pm | Foyer of Meditation, Armstrong Browning Library
As the specter of “the enemy from within” once again haunts reactionary politics across the Americas, this talk addresses the ways in which Brazil’s Cold Warriors, the architects of a brutal military dictatorship, envisioned and sought to eradicate their internal foes. Following a coup in 1964, Brazil experienced over twenty years of authoritarian rule, marked by curtailment of civil liberties and by state violence that peaked between 1968 and 1974. The military regime, like similar right-wing counterparts across the continent, waged a war against communism—or, better put, against perceived communist plotting, which the regime’s strategists dubbed “subversion.” But what was so-called subversion? At one level, this talk asks what the Cold War was really about, theoretically and practically speaking, in the continent’s second-largest democracy and in one the conflict’s signal Latin American and hemispheric chapters. At a broader level, we shall seek to explore the construction of alterity and the role of morality, gender, and sexuality in the facilitation of state and para-state violence.
"Re-christianize to Restore”: Christian Traditionalism, Brazil, and the Road to Christian Nationalism
Thursday, April 3rd, 2025 | 3:30 - 5:00 pm | Foyer of Meditation, Armstrong Browning Library
This talk posits Brazil as a critical locus for gestating the New Right, in remarkably varied and spectacular iterations. Often conceived of as a conservative reaction to the U.S. Civil Rights movement, the New Right actually developed transnationally, with determinative participation from Brazilian activists. This talk illuminates the path that led the Americas to the current crossroads of far-right resurgence. We shall focus on a revelatory subset of those activists, who demonstrate collaboration that (1) linked elite reactionaries in Brazil, the United States, and elsewhere; (2) facilitated the rise of conservative Christianity as populist groundswell; and (3) transformed these two countries into power centers of a Right that adheres to the now-familiar Brazilian moniker “Bible, Bullets, and Beef.” The animating question for our discussion here will be, in a sense, how we got here—to a moment in which Christian conservatisms in Brazil and the United States have overcome many of their deep divisions, to reflect both each other and the global salience of reactionary populisms. From well-known figures like Olavo de Carvalho, Steve Bannon, Jair Bolsonaro, and J.D. Vance to the lesser-known (if no less splashy) representatives of the transnational Catholic Right, the remarkable salience of restorationism has emerged not coincidentally, but via collaboration and a shared set of strategies, priorities, and languages.