The ongoing internationalization of academia is growing thanks to the migration of scholars, but this phenomenon has multiple origins and may have many implications. In some Countries, funding research opened the doors to scholars native to the colonies or from Africa because of the need to remove the guilts of the past and reconstruct a common, shared history in a common land. In EU, internal scholarly immigration is useful to build a new political identity, but it must coexist with a number of ongoing crises, such as economic instability and very fluid waves of migration. This situation expands the principle of inclusiveness beyond historical connections and induces drastic reinterpretations of the past. Historically Europeans are all part of one continent, but culturally they still know little about each other because of the rift opened during the age of extremes. Easterner historians study the texts of Western ones, but the same thing does not happen at the same level in the opposite direction. In the West, knowledge of studies done in Eastern Europe seems to end up at most in Budapest. From a historiographical point of view, the division process started after World War I, but communications ceased altogether with the end of WWII. Two generations passed since the end of the Cold War and historiographical connections still remain interrupted, despite the fact we could read what ‘others’ write, but this is not just a problem of linguistic hegemony. Western European culture should feel a mood of ‘uneasiness’ after 1989, as Eric Hobsbawm pointed out. On the one hand, there are the Latin and Anglo-Saxon languages, each one with its own historiographical consolidated point of view, and on the other hand are contributions written by scholars who have undertaken a cultural revision of their recent past. This context does not allow the construction of common historical grounds. This session is aimed at being a roundtable discussion for scholars seeking a new historical research approach, making room for the emergence of new voices/narratives that would change how we think about European urban history. It is a call for those involved in research projects or working groups where the fusion of distinct cultures is the basis for questioning established points of view, how they experiment with shared research methodologies and exchanges of historical sources to create conscious, acceptable, and useful narratives to both sides for overcoming differences of opinion.

Coordinators: Massimo Visone (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II), Anda-Lucia Spânu (The Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities from Sibiu)