This post introduces an exhibition at the EUI in February 2023 for Black History Month. History researcher and exhibition curator Daphné Budasz argues that learning about the diversity of Black life trajectories in Europe is a way to challenge White historical imagination.

In this post for Black History Month 2023, history researcher Amber Burbidge argues that understanding the presence of Black and mixed-heritage people in Renaissance Florence is an important step towards decolonisation, also for the EUI.

Nearly fifty years after the Portuguese Colonial War, Africans who were conscripted by the Portuguese and disabled in battle still struggle to claim veterans’ benefits. History researcher Carlos Martins has interviewed former soldiers to understand this painful legacy.

In this post, history researcher Dario Willi takes us back to a catalytic moment in the art restitution movement, when the Ghanaian filmmaker Nii Kwate Owoo publicised the innumerable artworks and artefacts languishing in the British Museum, after their removal from source communities in a context of colonial domination.

Catalonia’s merchants and towns profited hugely from the transatlantic slave trade after it was banned in the nineteenth century, as history researcher Adrià Enríquez Àlvaro documents. The good news is the recent movements to critique and reverse official amnesia, regarding public history and monuments.

For history researcher Friedrich Ammermann, a brief glimpse of colonial journalistic condescension opens broader questions about the control and ‘translation’ of information between the colonisers and the colonised – some of which might be recoverable in the archives.

Examining the modern commemoration of an eighteenth-century African-German scholar, history researcher Anna Orinsky warns against allowing a symbolic ‘Black biography’ to eclipse a real life and work.

In this editorial and introduction to the 2022 Black History Month blog series, history researcher Daphné Budasz explains why it is important to make Black lives and scholarship more visible at the EUI.