Webinar: Exhibiting European History and Memories in the Digital Age

Although the idea of Europe dates back to ancient times and was crystallised in the Enlightenment, the plan for European unification emerged in the second half of the 20th century as a consequence of an economic process based on a single market and a single currency. European integration is therefore a recent chapter in the history of Europe, one which has been written before our very eyes, but it remains fragmented into disparate national histories.

In the 21st century, those writing the history of Europe find themselves confronted with a threefold challenge: they must meet the demands of the digital age, adjust to the paradigm shift within the historical discipline and navigate the geopolitical upheavals that the continent has been experiencing since 1989 (the fall of communism; the enlargement of the European Union; the many crises the EU has faced, including Brexit; the divide between institutions and citizens; the socio-economic consequences of the global crisis, including the COVID-19 health crisis; the new nature of transatlantic relations, etc.).

Today’s historians must find answers to several fundamental questions: How can European history be pieced together, written and preserved today, when the reality often lies beyond our foresight and when the rules of the game, the underlying framework and the keys to understanding have changed? How can we foster the emergence of a new vision of European history on the basis of a comparative, multifaceted, democratic approach? What is history’s response to the challenge of remembrance? How can we strike a balance between reviving the identity narratives of national history and writing a unified narrative of European history? What role do interdisciplinarity, digital methodologies, interactivity and networking play in the analysis and interpretation of sources? How can the history of European integration be told to younger generations? How can this history be put on display in museums? How can it be shared in the digital age?

EDIC University of Luxembourg, in collaboration with its partners - the House of European History, the European Parliamentary Research Service, Europeana, the Representation of the European Commission in Luxembourg, the European Museum Schengen and Europe Direct Schengen - is pleased to invite you to the Webinar “Exhibiting European History and Memories in the Digital Age” on Wednesday 24 February 2021 at 14:00.

See the event here.

Programme

• 14:00 – Introductory remarks – Elena Danescu, Manager of EDIC University of Luxembourg
• 14:10 – Presentations by guest speakers and debate with participants:
  • Constanze Itzel, Museum Director of the House of European History
  • Etienne Deschamps, Historian in the European Parliamentary Research Service
  • Douglas McCarthy, Collections Engagement Manager at the Europeana Foundation
• 15:20 – Concluding remarks – Ludovic Delepine, Head of Archives at the European Parliament
• 15:30 – Close of the event

Presentation of the speakers

Constanze Itzel is Museum Director at the House of European History in Brussels. She has worked on the
House of European History project as adviser and curatorsince its beginnings in 2009, and has been leading the museum since June 2017. Previously, Constanze worked as teaching assistant at the University of Heidelberg, as a curator at the Badisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe, and did freelance work and internships in five other museums in Germany and France. From 2005, she has worked in Brussels first as a research
and later a committee administrator for the Committee on Culture and Education of the European Parliament. Constanze holds a PhD for her thesis on the impact of the image debate on fifteenth-century paintings.

Étienne Deschamps holds a PhD in Contemporary History from the European University Institute in Florence and is an affiliated researcher at the Université catholique de Louvain. He works at the Directorate-General for Parliamentary Research Services within the European Parliament Secretariat. He was previously a curator at the House of European History before becoming head of outreach and dissemination for the Historical Archives of the European Parliament. He is currently a member of the European Parliament Library. His research focuses on European integration history and the history of colonisation. He is also a member of the Academic Committee for the Robert Schuman House.

Douglas McCarthy has a Master’s degree in Art History from the University of St Andrews. Over the past two decades, he has worked internationally in public museums, private art collections and image archives in a variety of roles, including photographic studio manager, researcher, curator and collections manager. Driven by keen curiosity and a love of visual culture, Douglas is a passionate advocate for making cultural heritage openly accessible to promote the exchange of ideas and to contribute to a thriving knowledge economy. As Collections Engagement Manager at Europeana, Douglas supports Europeana’s mission by working with partner institutions to showcase their collections to online audiences. A key element of his work is developing Europeana’s thematic collections, especially on art and photography, to give users access to relevant and high-quality content from the corpus.

Ludovic Delepine has more than 25 years’ experience in IT, including IT governance for public administration, enterprise architecture and digital transformation. He leads the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s IT governance thematic hub. Currently, he is Head of the Archives Unit at the Office of the Secretary-General in the European Parliament. He holds a Ph.D. in IT from the University of Bourgogne, where his principal areas of specialisation were artificial intelligence, and the internet and communication technologies. He has also worked as a lecturer at French universities and as a researcher in these fields at CNRS laboratories for over eight years.

Webinar recording