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Activity Funded

Institute of Medieval Studies

Instituto de Estudos Medievais

Reference
UIDB/00749/2020
Project Start Date
2020-01-01
Project End Date
2024-12-31
Principal Investigator
Funding Program
Concurso de avaliação no âmbito do Programa Plurianual de Financiamento de Unidades de I&D (2017/2018) - Financiamento Base

Abstract

10.2 Summary in English for general dissemination purposes The Institute of Medieval Studies (IEM) has a strong identity, as the only RU in Portugal dedicated exclusively to Medieval Studies and the only to gather such a diverse team of researchers. They work across a large spectrum of disciplines, providing the RU with the interdisciplinary character that has been its trademark from the onset. The trajectory of the RU has been a rising one. The last research cycle (2014-2017) has transformed the RU even more, consolidating its position further in both national and international terms, seeing innovative research, the implementation of open access policy, the coherence of advanced training and dissemination, the collaboration with Municipalities, Heritage sites, Museums, Historical Archives and Libraries, and private and public foundations and companies devoted to cultural intervention, archaeology and tourism. We envisage the next four years to be a time of consolidation, new challenges and improvement. During that period we intend to continue asserting the RU’s international profile and its capacity to produce cutting-edge state of the art and innovative research of an interdisciplinary nature for the academic public. We will do so by enhancing our participation in EU projects and networks, by publishing in foreign languages in indexed publications of reference, and by investing in the dissemination of knowledge to every audience, through committing even more to EU Open Science policies (open research data and databases, e-books and e-journals, deposit of all production in national and international repositories and infrastructures). We will also expand our role with the general public by adopting strategies of Science Communication, to greater impact our research on societal perceptions of the Middle Ages in all its shapes and forms, and to fight prejudice and misconceptions about the period. Using the tools provided by the Digital Humanities and workingin close collaboration with the institutions above mentioned, we aim to have a far more active role as producers of knowledge-based information for the promotion of more rigorous instruments of interpretation and understanding of Cultural, Heritage and Tourist sites. We hope such actions will also help create the conditions necessary to promote self-sustainable jobs in the future. We also intend to continue feeding research into teaching at all levels, not just in the traditional sense but especially through developing educational dossiers, open editions and translations of sources, and other teaching resources. Moreover, we wish to continue promoting the insertion of young undergraduates in the IEM, introducing them to research very early in their careers. Last, but not least, it is this RU’s intention to continue working in close collaboration with all RUs and universities where there are medievalists, in Portugal and abroad, and to widen joint initiatives as much as possible. It is only through collaborative work that we can make real progress. 10.3 Summary in English for evaluation The IEM was created fifteen years ago and since then, the trajectory of the RU has in the ascenddant, both in terms of quality and in numbers of researchers. We are already the main productive center of innovative knowledge on Portuguese Middle Ages in its European context, not just because we are the only RU in Portugal that works exclusively in the interdisciplinary field of Medieval Studies, but because the research and activities that the RU engaged in, in the last years, have deserved national and international recognition and visibility, for its quality and dynamism. We now have a much stronger basis on which to build a far more aspiring plan, aiming at consolidating and expanding the role of this RU as a center for excellence. In our vision, this could be done at four levels: 1) stronger and successful participation in EU Projects and Networks; 2) sustenance of the high quality level of its researchers; 3) pursuit and increase of the open access policy and the universal availability of research data; 4) expansion of the connection with the civil society, on a sustainable basis and in close collaboration with institutions of culture, in order to enable the impact of the research being lead in the IEM to expand its intervention near the general public, by providing consultancy and hands-on services to the institutions above mentioned, to help create a knowledge based well informed society and to help sustain life-long learning, promote Cultural Heritage and Historical critical awareness for the greater public. And hopefully, to create the condition for a subsequent rise of new self-sustainable jobs, whose vital role in the local communities and society in general this RU thinks that it could help to implement. The most recent cycle (especially 2014-2017) has transformed the RU in terms of its national consolidation, its role on international grounds, the innovative research, the open access policy, the coherence of the work on advanced formation, dissemination and collaboration with Municipalities, Heritage sites, Museums, Historical Archives and Libraries, private and public foundations and firms devoted to cultural intervention, archaeology and tourism. The international profile of the RU was refreshed by growing numbers of postdoctoral fellows coming from abroad, the presence of renowned foreign academics in international meetings, and the visiting fellows and PhD students that chose the IEM as the base for their research stays. All this has greatly encouraged the sort of communication that sees the motto of IEM “Promoting Research, Supporting Researchers” become a reality. That, and the resolve to intervene in academia and in society at large on the three priority fields defined by the RU: research, training and dissemination. Those were the goals we embraced in the last RA exercise, and the ones we intend to maintain in the 4 comingyears. Until now, the major Research Line “People and Knowledge in Motion: Portugal in trans-European Networks” has provided a large umbrella under which we have been suitably installing our research. The scientific areas in which the researchers specialize and the themes in which we have been working for the last five years, all converge in the study of people and knowledge in Motion, and all lead us to conceive such mobility as a driving force that cuts across the disciplinary research areas of most of the investigators of IEM. Both our research and the ways in which we grew up as a team, interacting and debating among ourselves and with the rest of the medievalists community, led us to the practical conclusion that the Middle Ages that we study, from the travel of pigments and books to the itinerancy of Kings, ecclesiastics and merchants, from the shape and structure of Christian and Muslim cities, to the differences between port towns, big or small cities, rural settlements and settlement of disputes, is a much more global phenomenon than expected Until recently, the RU was organized in two Research Groups (RG), which in turn were subdivided in small subgroups that corresponded to diverse research interests: Images, Texts and Representations gathered subgroups the majority which composed of art historians, but also literature and history academics, that worked on medieval illuminure and sculpture, Literature and Historical Archives, Cultural and Visual Studies and Sociocultural Representations and Constructions; The RG “Territories and Powers: a “glocal” perspective”, composed especially of historians and archaeologists, although already integrating art historians had scholars working on Mapping the Political and Ideological Structures of the Kingdom, landscapes for exercising of Power Strategies: Large Cities and Small Towns, Medieval Rural Communities and Landscapes and Circulation of Elites, Models and Processes. From this enunciation it is perhaps understandable that what happened was that most “boundaries” between groups and subgroups were crossed, and we directed our research towards more inclusive and almost post disciplinary work that shaped the reality which we have today. Groups of people from different disciplinary backgrounds working on new themes, some wider and others more restricted, but still operative under the two new large thematic umbrellas that we chose for our work, i.e. introducing a new Thematic trend on “Heritage and Material Culture”. (see 11.2) We envisage the next four years as years of challenge and consolidation. The best represented major scientific areas are still History and History of Art, (for which we would like to have a specialist in the evaluation panel if possible) but Archaeology is also on the rise, as are the archival sciences and the heraldry. Altogether, we study manuscripts, the world of ecclesiastics and the religious, politics& policies, the construction of royal power, conflict solving, rural settlements, big, small & port towns, commerce, diplomacy, travel and pilgrimage.

Institutions

Main Institutions

  • Universidade Nova de Lisboa Instituto de Estudos Medievais (UNL IEM)
  • Universidade Nova de Lisboa (UNL)

Funding 989.624,99 €

Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - Portugal

989.624,99 €