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.

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.

In the momentum of the Black Lives Matter protests, cities around the world have been challenged to remove commemorative statues recalling their colonial or slaveholding pasts. EUI history researcher Daphné Budasz examines these controversies through a reflection on commemoration, national identity and the social role of history.