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Prof. Dr. Larissa Rosa Corrêa

Guest Researcher, Professorship for Global History

    YouTube Premiere – Documentary

    On Friday, 21 November, the documentary Eu sou padre operário (I am a worker priest) will celebrate its premiere on YouTube. The film is based on original historical research by Larissa Rosa Corrêa (PUC-Rio, Brazil / University of Potsdam), written and directed by Deivison Amaral (PUC-Rio) and Yasmin Getirana (LSE, England), with image research by Gabriela Henriques (PUC-Rio).

    You are cordially invited to attend the premiere and activate notifications here.

    The film will remain available at the same link after the premiere.

    Synopsis: Brazil, 1960s. Fathers Jacques, Pierre and Romain leave Europe and arrive in various Brazilian cities to fulfil a mission. They did not wear cassocks, but ordinary clothes. They did not work in parishes, but chose to do proletarian work. The documentary film ‘I am a worker priest’ tells the story of these and other European worker priests who, driven by a mission of faith and solidarity, suffered oppression and fought alongside Brazilian workers in resistance to the military dictatorship of the Cold War.

    Curriculum Vitae

    Larissa Rosa Corrêa is Associate Professor of History at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio (PUC-Rio), and a research fellow of the Brazilian Scientific Research Council (CNPq). She also conducts research with the support of Rio de Janeiro’s Science Foundation (FAPERJ), Brazil.

    She is a Brazilian labor historian with interests in trade union movements, Labor Justice, labor corporatist systems, the Catholic Church, and women’s labor organizations in Brazil and the Southern Cone during the Cold War. Corrêa has published articles in several peer-reviewed journals, including International Labor and Working-Class History, International Review of Social History, and Labor (Durham, N.C.).

    She earned her PhD in Social History at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), Brazil. In her doctoral research, Corrêa studied trade union relations between Brazil and the United States during the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s. She focused particularly on the exchange program run by the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), a branch of the AFL-CIO and the U.S. State Department, which targeted Brazilian labor leaders and sought to introduce them to the American way of life and the U.S. labor movement.

    The results of this research are presented in two books:

    • “Disseram que voltei americanizado: relações sindicais Brasil e Estados Unidos” (Editora da Unicamp, 2017, in Portuguese)
    • “Anti-Communist Solidarity. US-Brazilian Labor Relations During the Dictatorship in Cold War Brazil (1964–1985)” (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022, in English).

    Her current book project, “Transnational Catholic Labor Activism: The Circulation of Worker-Priests Between Europe and South America (1960s and 1970s),” examines how the working class under authoritarian regimes redefined notions of labor rights, social justice, dignity, citizenship, and humanity under the influence of the progressive Catholic sector.

    This project highlights the role of the Catholic Church in the opposition to Southern Cone military regimes during the Cold War, based on the relationship between the so-called “worker-priests” and working-class communities. Moreover, by considering the Catholic Church as a powerful transnational actor, the study rethinks religious and labor connections between Europe, Brazil, and Latin America more broadly, through the analysis of the individual trajectories of both foreign and local worker-priests as well as the role of international Catholic organizations.