The Postgraduate Program in Local and Regional History (PPGHIS), presented in this report, is a master degree located at the Department of Human Science at the State Bahia University. This program was recommended by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) in June 2006.

The Human Science Department was created in 1980 and, initially, its role was to be a college focused in educating future teacher’s, afterwards it became, in July of 1983, the V Campus of UNEB and it is located at Loteamento Jardim Bahia, city of Santo Antônio de Jesus, Bahia, Brazil.

The PPGHIS is a program that integrates teaching, research and extension, with a goal to empower the students graduated as History Bachelor’s and in other related areas. That way they can work in academia and, also, in the development of researches focused in increase the historical knowledge. Hence, as the postgraduation program is focused in the formation and improvement of the professionals it is expected to create conditions for the improvement of the quality of teaching, development of research and production of knowledge in the regions where this courses acts.

The State of Bahia University (UNEB) is an institution that have a very important social role. The university have a campus located in the city of Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia, that is compound by 04 departments. However, the university also has other 25 campuses that are spread in 23 cities ranging from the north to the south of the state.  This wide range of campuses, with distances varying from 100km to 850km from the city of Salvador, creates a complex structure which gives to the UNEB a lot of unique peculiarities. The Bahia State University also comports 80 bachelor degrees and 8 of postgraduate courses at the Masters and PhD levels. The university has the institutional policy of offering and expanding projects that can focus on promoting qualified formation to the students.  In that sense, the university aims to answer the demands of our contemporaneity times, which includes performing actions that are committed to the serious problems that were historically accumulated.

Additionally, the UNEB has been committing itself to the construction of diversified spaces not only in the different areas of the knowledge, but also in the different geographic territories, some of them located in smaller regions of state of the Bahia. This construction is made through the production, reflection and intervention on the public policies for higher education in the state of Bahia.

Therefore, the proposal of the Program of Post-graduation in Regional and Local History arises, between other reasons, from the concern to reinsure the importance of the UNEB as forum of excellence in the production of the scientific knowledge. The university always focus in create and promote, near the local and regional communities where it acts, spaces for reflection and for the construction of tools that enable the communities to interfere in the decision-making and critical insertion in their reality. So, it is known that the PPGHIS performance has been contributing a lot to the consolidation of the social role of the UNEB as an institution oriented to the development of the several regions where it is inserted, especially in the region of the Recôncavo.

It is important to mention that the universe of registered and enrolled students at the PPGHIS is quite diverse as they are originated not only from the city of Santo Antônio de Jesus, but also from surrounding areas, as well as from Salvador and too many other cities located in the south region of the state of Bahia, in addition to participating students from the neighbour state of Sergipe.

The PPGHIS has the aim to educate qualified professionals in a very high level so they can act in the development of research and production of knowledge, focusing in the novel historiographic tendencies. This new historical researches shelters studies that follow the lines of Afro-Brazilian culture, slavery and enslavement, power relations, memory, language and culture, social and cultural representations, traditions, religiosity, gender, city/country side, relations of work, trajectories and migrations, among others.

The Program was structured from a concentration area in Regional and Local History and has two lines of research: 1) Regional studies: Countryside and City and 2) Studies of the Afro-Brazilian Populations trajectories.

These two lines of research take as starting point the place to think about different themes of the historical knowledge such as culture and cultural diversities, daily practices and religiosity, memory and oblivion, narratives and oral histories. Considering that it is the third year of the PPGHIS performance, it is understood that the program is becoming a reference as a History postgraduation course in the region of Recôncavo, especially if considered that it is the first master degree performed by the Bahia State University in the country side of the state. Therefore, taking into account the rates of applications and approval in the last selection, it is possible to verify that there is an average that is maintained and, probably, it is going to expand during the following years as the PPGHIS is a course in a consolidation process.

The Program currently provides some Groups of Research, they are: 1. Regional and Local History; 2. History, Literature and Memory; 3. Oral History and Memory; 4. History of Portuguese America; 5. Group of Studies of the Present Time and; 6. Firmina – Post-Colonialism: Education, History, Culture and Affirmative Actions, all them compound by our faculty members and students.

These groups occupy spaces of theoretical and methodologic reflections about historical doing, they also discuss the study objects developed by the Faculty Members and Students linked to each group. Additionally, these groups allow the exchange of experiences, and also allow the sharing of knowledge between Masters students of several Higher Education Institutions of Brazil. All of that allied to a systematic control of attendance of the tutor and his orientated guarantees the quality and the excellence of the dissertations, in order to pursue the efficiency in postgraduation students’ formation.

We have, yet, laboratories, which are spaces of integration between graduate and post graduate students. They can develop and increase the range of researches and academic studies, promoting the qualification of both levels of formation of the Human Sciences Department. Thus, in the of Santo Antônio de Jesus, the laboratories in the Bachelor’s History degree are listed as: Interdisciplinary Historical Studies; Studies of Gender and Childhood, Teaching of History, History, Cinema and Images; Oral History and Memory; and Black Culture, Slavery and Post-abolition period. The laboratories are integrated to the NIEMBA and AFROUNEB:

1. LABORATORY OF INTERDISCIPLINARY HISTORICAL STUDIES (This laboratory is an operational instance for production and reflection of the line of research Regional Studies: Countryside and City).

2. STUDIES OF GENDER AND CHILDHOOD;

3. TEACHING OF HISTORY;

4. LABORATORY OF AUDIOVISUAL HISTORY: methods and theories for approach of audio-visual sources of Cultural History;

5. ORAL HISTORY AND MEMORY;

6. HISTORY, CINEMA AND IMAGE;

7. BLACK CULTURE: SLAVERY AND POST-ABOLITION PERIOD;

In this report, you will be able to find information about the PPGHIS.