Showing posts with label EUI. Show all posts

Saturday, 31 January 2015

Workshop Public History and the Media, February 2015

The IFPH-FIHP, together with the NCPH and other associations and cultural institutions, sponsors an important workshop on Public History which will take place at the History and Civilisation Department, European University Institute, in Florence-Fiesole, Italy, 11th, 12th and 13th February 2015. The goals of the workshop, the name of the participants and the full programme are published below. Two professors in the History and Civilization Department at the EUI shared the scientific organisation with the responsible of this blog: Prof. Luca Molà and Prof. Lucy Riall. Sandra Toffolo, project manager for European History Primary Sources coordinates the administration of the workshop. Who is, in general, interested by Public History, the interconnection between the discipline and the media, the differences between academic and public history, the public history job market and digital public history issues, is warmly encouraged to attend this workshop open freely to everybody.

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Public History and the Media

: Photography by Serge Noiret for the Workshop "Public History and the Media" (San Francisco - March 2014)

In recent decades, public enthusiasm for history and popular engagement with the past has grown dramatically. The popularity of history is manifested most visibly in the proliferation of television documentaries and historical dramas but it is also discernible in the rebirth of the historical novel, the organization of large-scale commemorations of historical anniversaries, the development of new historical museums and exhibitions, re-enactments and living history activities and the emergence of public history as a separate field of academic study. Digitization has also brought history and historical research to the broader public in hitherto unconceivable ways. Yet, for the most part, and with some notable exceptions, academic historians have remained extraneous to these developments, and their relationship to the public is different from that of public historians.

Is this difference between academic and public historians only about different professional ambitions, separate audiences and a different use of communication media? While it is not possible to become a public historian without an academic background, it is possible to be an academic historian without engaging in public history. Both are professional historians working with the past: their roles and their audiences are complementary although their practices are different in terms of methodology and forms of communication. Moreover, the development of public history raises questions about historical interpretation and the political use of the past that concern all historians, and should provoke a debate about ownership of the past in which both academic and public historians have much to contribute.

This workshop will take place at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy and is organised by the History and Civilisation Department, The Historical Archives of the European Union and the Max Weber Programme’s Academic Careers Observatory. The scientific organizers, Luca Molà, Serge Noiret and Lucy Riall, brought together a number of leading practitioners in the field of public history and the media to discuss the current state of the field and in order to explore the relationship between public history and academic history. The first day of the workshop will be given over to exploring the relationship between history and media culture, with panels on oral history, publishing and teaching, films and the phenomenon of so-called ‘media dons’. The second day will focus on digital public history tools, practices and narratives. The third day will deal with the history of public history in the USA, discuss public history as an alternative career and look at public history in museums and exhibitions.

: Photography by Serge Noiret: Florence from the Badia Fiesolana, European University Institute

Day 1 - Wednesday 11 February 2015 – Villa Schifanoia, Sala Europa

8.30-9.00 Registration (Sala Bandiere)

9.00-9.30 Welcome and Introduction

9.30-11.00 Session 1 - Oral History

Chair: Luisa Passerini (EUI)

‘L’Archivio degli Iblei’ and ‘Terramatta’: Sharing Memories Publically - Chiara Ottaviano (Cliomedia Officina, Turin)

Oral History and Video Performance - Giovanni Contini Bonacossi (Associazione Italiana Storia Orale)

‘Italy in a Day’ by Gabriele Salvatores: The First Italian User Generated Film - Ilaria Castiglioni (Indiana Production, Milan)

11.00-11.30 Coffee Break

11.30-13.00 Session 2 - Publishing

Chair: Lucy Riall (EUI)

Big History: Making New History Books into Major Events - Simon Winder (Penguin)

From Written to Live History: A Publisher’s Experience - Giuseppe Laterza (Laterza Editore)

13.00-14.30 Lunch

14.30-16.00 Session 3 - Teaching Public History and the Use of Textbooks

Chair: Stéphane Van Damme (EUI)

Inventing Europe: Teaching Europe Through the Lens of Technology - Suzanne Lommers (Foundation for the History of Technology)

Master Narratives and History Education: Wasn’t the Spanish Reconquest Actually a Conquest? - Mario Carretero (EUI & Universidad Autonoma Madrid)

Teaching Digital Public History - Enrica Salvatori (Università degli Studi di Pisa)

16.00-16.15 Break

16.15-17.15 Session 4 - TV and Radio

Chair: Youssef Cassis (EUI)

Broadcasting History: The Constraints and Possibilities of the Medium - Luca Molà (EUI) and Lucy Riall (EUI) in conversation with Amanda Vickery (Queen Mary University of London)

17.15-17.45 Coffee Break

17.45-20.15 Rai Fiction Film: Un mondo nuovo - Altiero Spinelli

Introduction

Pier Virgilio Dastoli (Consiglio Italiano del Movimento Europeo) and Alberto Negrin (Director)

Projection of the Film (with English subtitles)

Q & A

Day 2 - Thursday 12 February 2015 – Historical Archives of the European Union, Villa Salviati

9.00-9.45 Keynote Lecture - What is Digital Public History? - Mark Tebeau (Arizona State University)

9.45-11.15 Session 5 - Digital Public History Narratives

Chair: Rebecca Conard (Middle Tennessee State University)

Urban Media Archive in the City of Lviv: From Collecting to Engaging - Bohdan Shumylovych (EUI & Center for Urban History of East-Central Europe)

CENDARI: The Collaborative European Digital Archive Infrastructure for the Study of WW1 and Medieval Culture - Andrea Buchner (University of Birmingham)

From the War to the Web: Crossing Borders with the Europeana 1914-1918 Project - Ad Pollé (Europeana)

11.15-11.45 Coffee Break

11.45-13.15 Session 6 - Digital Archives

Chair: Dieter Schlenker (EUI-Historical Archives of the European Union)

The Medici Archive: Private Collection and Public Use - Alessio Assonitis (The Medici Archive Project)

The Venice Time Machine Project - Frédéric Kaplan (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)

13.15-15.00 Lunch

15.00-16.30 Session 7 - Mobile and Time-Based History

Chair: Mark Tebeau (Arizona State University)

Memory Sharing and the New Media in Exhibiting Florence 1940-1944 - Valeria Galimi (Università della Tuscia)

Oral History Contents in the Web: The Memoro Archive - Luca Novarino (Memoro Project)

In Susan Horner’s Florence - Alyson Price (The British Institute of Florence)

16.30-17.00 Coffee Break

17.00-18.30 Session 8 - European Narratives

Chair: Federico Romero (EUI)

Writing a New History of Europe - Frédéric Clavert (Labex EHNE, Paris)

Using EU Websites for the History of European Integration - Dieter Schlenker (EUI-Historical Archives of the European Union)

HistoGraph: Human and Machine Computation for European Integration Studies - Lars Wieneke (CVCE Luxembourg)

Day 3 - Friday 13 February 2015 – Badia Fiesolana, Refectory

9.00-10.30 Session 9 - Public History in the USA

Chair: Serge Noiret (EUI)

The Pragmatic Turn in American Historical Thought and Public History Education in the United States - Rebecca Conard (Middle Tennessee State University)

Reflective Practice: Public History’s Signature Pedagogy - Patricia Mooney-Melvin (Loyola University Chicago)

Public History in the 21^st Century: Entrepreneurial Practice within a Shifting Professional Market - Patrick Moore (President National Council on Public History; University of West Florida, Pensacola; Historical Research Associates)

10.30-11.00 Coffee Break

: Photography by Serge Noiret, Florence from Bagno a Ripoli

11.00-13.00 Session 10 - EUI HEC Alumni Roundtable

Which Kind of Public Historians Are We? Public History as an Alternative Job Market for EUI Alumni -

Chair: Thomas Cauvin (University of Louisiana at Lafayette)

Speakers:

Dan H. Andersen (Freelance Historian, Reenactor, and Writer, Copenhagen)
Jozefien De Bock (Curator Project Migration, STAM -City Museum Ghent)
Christine Dupont (European Parliament-House of History)
Torsten Feys (Public History Programme Ghent University)
Ciaran O’Scea (Curator, Irish and the Spanish Monarchy Exhibition, Archivo General de Simancas)
Sven Mesinovic (Museumspädagoge (freelance) Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin)
Markus J. Prutsch (European Parliament)
Aurora Savelli (Portale ‘Storia di Firenze’)
Sandra Toffolo (EUI-European History Primary Sources)
Gerben Zaagsma (Project Anne Frank, Lichtenberg-Kolleg - the Göttingen Institute of Advanced Study)

13.00-14.30 Lunch

14.30-17.00 Session 11 - Museums and Exhibitions

Chair: Luca Molà (EUI)

Narrating Europe in a Museum? The House of European History - Étienne Deschamps (European Parliament)

Origins and Evolution of a Private Museum - Stefania Ricci (Museo Salvatore Ferragamo, Florence)

Museum-Based Research: The View from the Victoria & Albert - Bill Sherman (Victoria & Albert Museum) & Marta Ajmar (Victoria & Albert Museum)

17.00-17.30 Concluding Remarks and Coffee

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Scientific sponsors:

Sunday, 18 May 2014

European Ideals, Public History and the vote for the EU Parliament, May 22-25, 2014

Since the Lisbon Treaty in 2007, European citizens are able to better decide the kind of Europe they would like to live in: the EU Parliament influences the choice of the President of the European Commission. The EUandI project (EUI) provides European citizens with a tool that helps them deciding which party to vote for in the EP elections (May 22-25), based on their preferences concerning best policies for tomorrow's Europe.

But communicating to national public opinions why such a democratic activity is a fundamental issue influencing the future of Europe, has become a very hard task today. The EU hardly speaks directly to its citizens. More important, the EU does not refer to the historical construction of a united Europe and it is silent about European Memories with the only exception of the Holocaust. History and Memory do not offer decisive arguments to bring European citizens to the polls, building the future on a common knowledge about the past. Moreover, digital social media -Twitter uses the hashtag #EP2014 for the polls- are often silent about the historical dimension of the European Integration process and its importance today. History is sometimes abused to support present political goals but it remains often far away from political debates.

The broader narrative about the history of Europe encounters also negative criticisms reaching far beyond an interpretation of the historical process. Sometimes European intellectuals (including contemporary historians) are eager to stress all the problems experienced by the EU integration process. History, however, is not only about facts, but also about which facts are selected to interpret the past. And the writing of history takes into account contemporary contexts, ideologies and cultures. Historians are divided in their visions of the European past: should they still promote the idealistic contribution of the peace-keeping effect of European integration, as the Commission does? Clearly, today, unemployment and the power of the banks are far more visible than the results of the recent enlargment, which created a new peaceful space that includes Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans. The enlargment, however, also entails putting together conflicting pasts and memories. Today's enlarged Europe faces huge problems: how to integrate all new and old countries and how to renew the western European idealism in the postwar era and applying it to these new but different pasts and active memories ?

National public opinions are not interested in the historical dimension of our common pasts, but, rather, in today's unemployment in the Union. European citizens and politicians are generally unable to interpret the broader EU historical framework. Their public discussions revolve around very short term social, economic and financial issues. The whole EU byzantine institutional architecture, including the directly elected European Parliament, and the EU decision making process, are perceived as far away from ordinary lives. EU citizens know about their family memories, but they don't feel part of a wider European history.

There are not enough cultural initiatives dealing with conflicting memories and engaging the public with the broader European past and its contradictions. For example, the Museum of Europe in Brussels in 2010 held an exhibition called America, it's also our history and remained inactive from then.

The House of European History (expected late 2015) in Brussels, an initiative of the European Parliament itself, aims at establishing a large interpretative forum about different European pasts. The visitor experience will be shaped through a permanent exhibition, with the purpose of educating the public about European history beyond national boundaries, a history made of divergent pasts.

Building museums, commemorating past events, creating exhibitions, are the kind of cultural initiatives needed today. The vision of the European founding fathers, their dream of a united and peaceful Europe has disappeared from political discussions and although it remains a central theme in academic historiography, it has no impact on the wider European public. But voting for the EU parliament is a concrete political action that allows each citizen to be part of a shared process started with the long peaceful transition between the 20th and the 21st centuries in Europe.

The "United Europe" imagined by Churchill in January 1948, had to be unified looking at "moral, cultural, sentimental and social unities and affinities throughout all Europe.... " Two years later, Robert Schuman wrote confidentially to Konrad Adenauer on May 7 1950, just before submitting his famous "plan" to the French Government, that a peaceful European construction for the future had to be built remembering the violent pasts and conflicts between France and Germany. For Schuman, Europe integration needed concrete steps. And the European Coal and Steel Community (1952) was the first concrete initiative towards a unified and peaceful Europe. Many other concrete steps followed since then, until the signature of the Lisbon Treaty (2007). But the European integration process is slowly growing generation after generation. In this letter (republished in a very interesting French digital history project called Des Lettres), Robert Schuman wrote:

"Monsieur le Chancelier,

A la veille de proposer au Gouvernement Français de prendre une décision importante pour l'avenir des relations franco-allemandes, de l'Europe et de la Paix, je [...] désire aussi vous expliquer l'esprit dans lequel j'ai rédigé cette déclaration. La paix mondiale ne saurait être sauvegardée sans des efforts créateurs à la mesure des dangers qui la menacent. La contribution qu'une Europe organisée et vivante peut apporter à la civilisation est indispensable au maintien de relations pacifiques. [...] L'Europe ne se fera pas d'un coup ni dans une construction d'ensemble. Elle se fera si des réalisations concrètes créent d'abord une solidarité de fait. [...]."

Schuman's plan was all about a peaceful Europe. He started from an economic agreement. But behind economy, Europeanism was making a first concrete step towards integration. This process accelerated in the 21st century with the accession of central and eastern European countries to the EU. As the Ukraine example shows, the EU is an appealing ideal of peace, democracy and human rights for many.

Young generations in the Union have lost the memory of the 20th century global conflicts, the memory of their pasts. They ignore the reasons why the EU started to be concretely built by people like Schuman and Adenauer. Such a memory is not active in our present and has been forgotten by new nationalist anti-Euro(pean) parties. New narratives about Europe legitimaze today's euroskepticism and reinforce the power of antagonistic nationalisms.

Academic history is about free individual research and can be defined as "deep history", a critical analysis of the past with no need to link contemporary issues with it. But there is also a useful history for the present based on the findings of academic historiography: public history. The latter engages with memory issues in society and reaches a broader public opinion aiming at a more diffused knowledge of the past. This could become the role of the House of History.

A "useful history" also caracterises the one year exhibition in Brussels, commemorating the centenary of the 14-18 conflict: the First World War is our history. At the end of the visit the public is asked to answer questions, such as: what would you have done at the eve of WW1? But, more important, the exhibition ends with a slide showing the EU receiving the Nobel Prize for Peace 2012. This connection with the violent 20th century history is a metaphor: a peaceful Europe was created from the battlefield of Verdun to the Lisbon Treaty. This exhibition integrates the past as a living dimension of contemporary reflections about EU policies.

Public Historians in the Museum of Europe, together with Tempora, a Belgian private society specialized in design and management of exhibitions, have organized 14-18 It's Our History, (video available) which connects generations throughout the 20th century with today's Europe. Academic historians adopt a critical approach to the past in all circumstances and are skeptical about creating a "useful" historical connection between the traumatic battle of Verdun and the 2012 Nobel price. But such an approach could also be valid to narrate 20th century history.

The European Integration process is not taught in many EU educational systems. Digital media and the web can help building a better public awareness of the recent European past. Public historians can make an important contribution in this respect. In order to add a concrete historical dimension to the present, and a broader dimension to the European election, public historians in the Historical Archives of the EU at the European University Institute and in the Centre Virtual de la Connaissance de l'Europe (CVCE) in Luxembourg, have published online key historical documents concerning the process of EU integration. These include symbolic contributions to the European construction such as the Folon painting (1979) with the words, Europe is Hope. A digital communication of primary sources concerning European history promotes European citizenship and, maybe also a growing participation to the polls at the EU parliament elections in May 2014.

The CVCE published a short history of the EU Parliament with primary documents. The Center offers further readings to understand better the history of the European Parliament, its composition, the election of its Members and the number and distribution of seats as well as the single Statute for Members. "In view of the forthcoming European elections (22–25 May 2014), the CVCE offers a selection of resources (synopses, photos and graphics) and oral accounts about the European Parliament from its establishment in 1952 to the present day. This wealth of resources is available in French and English. In this way, the CVCE hopes to help improve public awareness of the European Parliament and contribute to a greater understanding of the issues involved in the European elections."

A Digital Public History approach to the history of the European Parliament (access to digital primary sources), is also a way through which the European University Institute Historical Archives of the European Union promotes a reflection on the past within a wider project about "Civil Society and the European Elections, 2014". A virtual exhibition, "L'Europa Vince. 35 years of European Elections", illustrates some important historical moments of the 35 years old EU Parliament.

L’Europa vince – 35 Years of European elections

"The European Parliament represents over 500 million inhabitants divided among the 28 Member States of the European Union. It is the only institution of the EU which is elected directly by its citizens every five years, it constitutes the principal democratic basis of the Union. With the entry into vigor of the Treaty of Lisbon, the Parliament received equal status as the Council in the framework of the legislative procedure. [...] The background to the European elections is well documented in the archives of the European institutions and in the private fonds held in the Historical Archives of the European Union in Florence. To illustrate the richness and the diversity of these fonds, the HAEU in partnership with the Archives Service of the European Parliament is offering an historical journey of the European Elections by means of a weekly selection of photos, posters, press cuttings and official documents."

Should we accept that Europe today is only about financial crisis, the power of banks, and unemployment? Such issues are certainly essential, but nevertheless, we should not forget Schuman's message delivered after the Second World War. Remembering history enlarges our narrow daily perspective and questions the fundamental reasons behind the vote itself and the possibility for each citizen to bet on a better future.

It is hard to understand how much a digital public history approach to European History, together with public exhibitions and public commemorations of the past could help stimulating a renewed European idealism or, more directly, a better understanding of the European integration process and participation to the vote in May.

Sunday, 6 October 2013

Could we go beyond Turnitin & anti-plagiarism softwares?

March 2008 version of TC through the Internet Archive

The 10th of October 2013, I will participate to THATcamp Leadership at the RRCHNM, the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia. THATcamp, The Humanities and Technology Camp was conceived at George Mason in 2008 and became soon international.

THATcamps were held in Paris in 2010 and 2013, in Florence at the European University Institute in 2011, in Lausanne and in Luxembourg/Trier in 2012 and many other THATcamps in Europe and in other continents.

THATcamp Florence 2011

Participating to ThatCamp will allow you to perform Digital Humanities activities in informal ways. That’s why it has been called an unconference. Following the CHNM's definition, "an unconference is a highly informal conference. Two differences are particularly notable. First, at an unconference, the program isn’t set beforehand: it’s created on the first day with the help of all the participants rather than beforehand by a program committee. Second, at an unconference, there are no presentations — all participants in an unconference are expected to talk and work with fellow participants in every session." During THATCamps "humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot".

What should I propose to THATcamp Leaderhip is something I was wondering from sometimes now so I decided to post a session proposal on the GMU website looking at what are my next duties for the History Department at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy. The EUI Dean of Studies and the Academic Service decided to introduce systematically the use of anti-plagiarism software. The reason is for single Ph.D. researchers to look at the various chapters and drafts of their dissertation during the four years research/writing process and verify the originality of the contents. They want to avoid having researchers shamed and expelled out of the community of scholars like this student in Norway!

The software Turnitin has been chosen and new administrative rules introduced on how to use it. Now, scholars on both side of the Ph.D. writing process: he who writes it and he who is supervising it, are both involved with digital tools. This is something that never happened before. At the EUI, this task which was performed by the staff of the Dean of Studies and the Academic Service, has now to be performed directly by the thesis supervisor before the decision taken by the departments to officially accept that a candidate submit a thesis for discussion with the jury. So, at the end of the process, when the thesis is submitted, each supervisor should perform this new task against plagiarism directly on the manuscript of his/her supervise. This task -and the instruments that are available to perform it- are today an evidence of the worldwide shift towards digital. It is taken for granted that everything we write is somewhere in the virtual space and can be retrieved and analyzed to avoid using someone else's ideas without acknowledging it. This is an extraordinary shift in the humanities sciences towards “other” humanities. It introduced a bit of digital humanities for everybody in a way!

Introductory courses to plagiarism, originality check, good academic practices and, finally, to Turnitin itself, have been organized for the first time this academic year 2013-2014 for all new doctoral researchers.

As History Information Specialist, I was asked to give my contribution both to the general discussion about plagiarism and to the correct way to use quotations in one's own research/writing activity. As far as the history department is concerned, I am helping its members –researchers, fellows and professors- to understand how they should proceed with the software. I will teach some Atelier Multimédia courses about it. But it's not this specific contribution -in the EUI context- that I would like to question.

I would like to have the input of the participants -if my session proposal will be selected of course- and bring to the attention of THATcamp Leadership what were the many queries and reflections on the use of such software that challenged –at least for me- a “simple” task: showing how to use Turnitin. This task became more complicated than I thought. I started to think beyond plagiarism and to look at what an “originality check” was meaning in a new digital scholarly process in the Humanities and History. What could we all do with Turnitin? And taken for granted that all EUI scholars will have to use it, what should I tell to those who never used any software before?

So my questions to TC Leadership would be to look at this software (and other similar software’s) from a different viewpoint. Is it possible to allow our community of humanists and social scientists to integrate one of the most important methods that enriched the process of document retrieval and document analysis in the field of Digital Humanities -"text-mining"- when teaching how to use plagiarism software? Here are some possible issues to discuss during THATcamp:

Turnitin is a software against plagiarism. Are they any other software’s you would recommend and why? Anything in the OA/OS world ?

Do you use these software’s only for originality checking and fighting plagiarism?

Which other tasks could they perform? Are they allowing us to know more and more easily about the deep web contents? And if so how and why?

How could we trace the originality of translated texts -from English to other languages and vice-versa-, using different languages corpora?

Could we think to use Turnitin to understand who is quoting what and in which contexts and the many other ways we interact with big online commercial textual databases like EEBO, ECCO, MOMW I & II, etc., or with open access web databases like Rousseau online ?

Up to which extend, these textual databases accessed through Turnitin, would allow contextualized keyword searching, similarity searching, frequency searching, etc., so to understand if a quotation we plan to use has already been used entirely or partially in other writings, how, where and by whom?

Could we perform with Turnitin a much more complex citations search then the one we were allowed to perform from years now with the Web of Knowledge (ISI) when, looking at the footnotes in a scholarly paper, we deduce that if somebody uses the same quotations, he/she may research in the same field and have similar ideas?

Which text-mining activities are allowed using this software’s if we accept the fact that Turnitin is a good Digital Humanities tool, able to perform one of the most important tasks within “big amount of data's”: distance/close reading, searching for contexts, origin of quotations, places of words in millions of documents?

And, as a consequence, could we discuss if this is not only about plagiarism but if these kind of software’s may become a vector to introducing wider communities –not only the digital humanities community- to new ways to perform their research activities? Are they taking care in a daily research activity -and even without knowing about it-, of some characteristics, of both the linguistic turn and the digital turn if we may use big concepts?

Turnitin seems to be an instrument that allows new digital experiments with, unfortunately some technical limitations. Our session in Virginia, could try to problematically look at the systematic introduction of these tools in universities worldwide: now that you know how to use it and what’s in it, which tasks do you think you could perform with such a tool? In what ways this instrument could become useful to you? And, this is maybe the most important question, in a global world where digital documents and primary sources aren’t all written in English, how these experiments with digital texts could take care of different cultural and linguistic frameworks?

Tuesday, 17 September 2013

Current Historiographical Research at the History and Civilisation Department, European University Institute, Florence, Italy

The Open Access e-journal Zeitenblicke 12 (2013), Nr. 1, is an interesting issue -based on interviews organised by EUI Ph.D. researchers and also single essays- dealing with the research community and activities in the History and Civilisation Department at the European University Institute (EUI). These essays and interviews are showcasing and informing about the many intellectual challenges that are part of the daily activities of the EUI History department.

Zeitenblicke is part of the excellent Historicum.Net, a portal for the Historical Sciences on the Internet in Germany. Sehepunkte, a component of the portal, is the best place to look for book reviews in the field of history in Germany -all historical periods are included and interdisciplinary works are also reviewed-, and Lesepunkte, a third component of the portal, is a platform for history teachers. Historicum.net is one of the best online history projects in Germany which is supported by the State Library of Bayern, the University of Cologne and many other German partners. Chronicon is a sophisticated search engine which allows better knowledge of the portal’s complete contents. The only criticism that could be raised -but this is an important one- is that nothing, not even the basic descriptions of the different contents of the portal, has been translated into English for the purpose of informing better a worldwide community of interested historians. Internet is, above all, access to global knowledge and the language of such a worldwide communication is English today, a language that was indeed used for some of the papers published in the Zeitenblicke's overview of the EUI History Department's research activities.

The issue is the result of an important initiative by some EUI history Ph.D. researchers. These promote the intellectual output and activities of the EUI History and Civilization Department dialogging with some EUI history department members, professors and former professors. In doing so, they reproduced in an online open access journal, the constant intellectual dialogue that is happening between all components of the Department, Ph.D. researchers, post-doctoral fellows, visiting scholars and professors, during the whole academic year.

The title of this Zeitenblicke monograph issue is "Current Historiographical Research at the European University Institute". Interviewers and authors of this issue are EUI Ph.D. researchers: Tilman Kulke, Moritz von Brescius, Robrecht Declercq and James White. They are the authors of a global introduction to this issue: Diversity in Unity: An Introduction to Historiography at the European University Institute.

Former EUI professors like Sebastian Conrad, Antonella Romano and Martin van Gelderen are interviewed together with the Head of the History Department, Federico Romero, Professor of History of Post-War European Cooperation and Integration and Jorge Flores, Professor of History of European Colonial and Post-Colonial Systems and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department. All the abstracts and the different interviews are publically accessible in Zeitenblicke:

The essays published in Zeitenblicke 12 (2013), Nr. 1 and completing this series of interviews are the following:

Frank Gerits: An International Approach to the Cultural Cold War. French Public Diplomacy Towards Africa (1945-1965)
Kaarlo Johannes Havu: Erasmus on Sovereignty, Politics and Rhetoric in Institutio principis Christiani
Carolina Obradors Suazo: From Citizenship to Citizenry. Towards a cultural approach to the figure of the citizen in the 15th century Barcelona

Brian Kjær Olesen: Entagled Positions. From Comparative and Transnational History to Histories of Possible Meanings

Jan-Hendrik Schulz: Kontinuität und Scheitern sozialrevolutionärer Terrorismen in den 1980er Jahren- die französische Action Directe (AD) und die westdeutsche Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) im Vergleich