At the initiative of the IHC and CHAM, NOVA FCSH is a partner of one of the winning projects of the first Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degrees-Partnership with Japan, a programme launched in October 2018 and the results of which were announced by the European Commission on 31 July 2019.

The consortium jointed by the IHC will implement an international master’s degree in ‘History in the Public Sphere’. It is led by the Central European University (Budapest) and the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, as well as the University of Florence. The main goal is to get students to combine historical scholarship with civic engagement, in order to prepare them for careers in producing and disseminating historical knowledge.

The public uses of history call for critical and comprehensive analyses and poses challenges to traditional academic knowledge-production, given that history enters the public sphere in highly diffused and commercialized forms, including new media such as blogs, TV infotainment, historical comics, and video-games — among others.

Pedro Aires Oliveira, President of the IHC’s Board and one of the researchers associated with the application, trusts that “the plan, the teaching methodologies, and the partners involved (universities, museums, cultural foundations) will make this Master’s degree a particularly attractive option for future researchers and media professionals”.

The European Commission, together with the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sport, Science and Technology, has selected three programmes offered by international consortia involving top universities. This was the only project approved in the humanities — the two other award-winning consortia, led by French, Finnish and Japanese universities, are focused on “Science in Imaging and Light in Extended Reality” and “Advanced Robotics”.