The Department of History takes pride in its historiographical, linguistic, and cultural diversity. We focus primarily on the history of Europe within a global context from the late medieval period to the present. We take a broad approach to the study of history that includes social and economic analysis as well as the history of cultural, scientific, and intellectual developments.
Our work analyses the tensions, contradictions, continuities and sharp breaks that characterise both Europe’s past and the study of that past, with a view to shedding light on present questions and chart possible futures.
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Research Themes
We study Europe in the world as a complex political and economic structure and a social and cultural fabric that has experienced moments of integration and disintegration. This broad perspective on Europe includes transregional and international interactions, institution building, and Europe’s self-representations. We also emphasize the critical re-evaluation of national historiographies and their contextualization in the history of Europe.
The current political, economic, and environmental challenges invite us to study the interconnected character of our world, its evolution, and the changing place of Europe in it. We investigate power relations in colonial and postcolonial societies, economic and trade relations, labour, migration, and infrastructure, as well as material culture and diplomacy. We seek to overcome Eurocentric views and to cooperate whenever possible with colleagues from the Global South.
We study intellectual history and cultural history broadly understood, from political ideologies to religious beliefs and scientific doctrines. We are interested in representations but also cultural practices and artefacts, with particular attention to their circulation within Europe and between Europe and other parts of the world. In the field of history of science and medicine, we emphasise the importance of studying scientific theories and approaches together with their material expression and their local interpretations.
The Department considers gender a powerful tool of analysis that allows historians to uncover central dimensions of human experience by studying the normative assumptions that inform economic, political, and social structures and behaviours. The history of sexuality and emotions as well as the history of health and disability are key aspects of the Department’s research profile. We encourage researchers to embrace an intersectional perspective to analyse how notions of health, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and age co-produce societies.
The Department promotes methodological diversity and dialogue between different historical approaches. We actively engage with digital history and public history and encourage dialogue with the research carried out in the other EUI departments (Economics, Political and Social Sciences, and Law), as well as with anthropology, the arts, cultural and media studies, environmental humanities, and other fields of interest.
Research theme of the year
Intersectional history
Intersectionality describes a critical approach and a heuristic lens that allows historians to ask questions that have previously escaped their attention. Intersectional histories look at interactions between socially produced hierarchies according to race, gender, class, age, sexuality, ability etc. Yet the aim is not to merely add more and more forms of disadvantage and privilege to the picture. Intersectional approaches focus on how various discriminatory structures co-shaped, intensified or attenuated one another.
Since Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term in 1989, it has generated a lot of political and analytical potential. And it has attracted critical interventions: Does intersectionality promote an exclusionary identity politics of ever smaller groups who are marginalized on several accounts? Does it tokenize differences? Can it support late-capitalist demands for flexible subjects who skillfully navigate the hierarchies around them? Can it be appropriated for other purposes that contradict the intentions of the black feminists who initiated the debate? These questions have been discussed with an eye to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies as well as in law, sociology and other academic fields. The discipline of history has not yet fully embraced its potentials to enrich this conversation.
Intersectionality needs to be more than a fashionable catch-phrase. Historians should seriously dwell upon its theoretical and methodological implications: In which ways does the approach enable better historiographical arguments and narratives? Careful empirical analyses and historical contextualization allow researchers to trace how interactions between discriminatory structures changed across time. This endeavor picks up on various more or less established strands of research: histories of capitalism and classist exploitation; of empire, colonialism and racism; of migration and ethnicized exclusion; of gender, sexuality and cis-hetero-normativity; of medicine, science and the shifting categorizations that undergirded societal rankings; and histories of disability and ableism.
Intersectional histories elucidate the interplay between disadvantaging and privileging hierarchies, on experiential as well as structural levels. And they highlight moments of resistance and activism against these powerful systems. Putting long-neglected groups center stage challenges and diversifies established narratives. Focusing on interactions between discriminatory structures and struggles against them complexifies our understanding of early modern as well as modern times. How then do intersectional approaches change our writing of European history?