EHEHI Scientific Policy - 2022-2028
Casa de Velázquez's scientific policy, centered on the Iberian Peninsula, the Maghreb and the Atlantic area, is structured around four main lines of research. These are supported by a network of international collaborations, and are eligible for funding from the French National Research Agency (ANR) and European institutions.
Casa de Velázquez also supports a dozen archaeological digs in Spain, Portugal, Morocco and Tunisia. These field operations, carried out in partnership with local and international institutions, contribute to the advancement of knowledge about past societies and are fully in line with the scientific dynamic of the establishment.
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Research areas
The proposed lines of research are based on three cross-cutting concepts: interdisciplinarity and diachrony, combining a multiscalar approach. Based on our areas of expertise - the Peninsular, Atlantic and Maghreb regions - these concepts, which are established as principles of action, enable us to transcend and connect disciplinary fields, and go beyond traditional historical periodization.
They also reinforce the existing synergy between the two departments of the École des hautes études hispaniques et ibériques.
Cities, communities, conflicts
Circulations, migrations, exchanges, networks
Heritage, inheritance, rewriting
1. Cities, communities, conflict
This line of research looks at spaces and communities from the angle of territorial appropriation and the conflicts that can result.
The choice of the notion of city enables us to grasp the spatial configuration in the plurality of its stakes. By raising the question of communities, our perspective also looks at states in terms of their capacity to generate bonds of belonging and community integration of a political, social, legal, religious and cultural nature, which, to use the accepted terminology, "fit together".
The geographical areas of particular interest to the École des hautes études hispaniques et ibériques (EHEHI) - the Iberian Peninsula, North Africa and Latin America - have been traversed and constituted by this polemical dimension, between peoples, territories and communities. This conflictuality is no longer necessarily expressed solely in terms of war.
Without being continuous or unequivocal, conflictuality has contributed to the reshaping of spaces, political constructs and economic circulations, as well as cultural representations.
Changing values or hybridizing dignities? Chivalric culture in 18th-century Bourbon dynasties
Duration: January 2026 - December 2027
Coordinators: Guillaume HANOTIN (Université Bordeaux Montaigne), Roberto QUIRÓS ROSADO (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
Political violence and exhumation crises in Southern Europe
Duration: January 2024 - December 2026
Coordinators: Dorothée DELACROIX (Sorbonne Nouvelle, Institut des hautes études de l'Amérique latine, CREDA), Zoé de KERANGAT (UNED)
Professional groups and authoritarian states on the Iberian Peninsula in the 20th century. Comparative perspective (Mediterranean, Latin America)
Duration: January 2026 - December 2028
Coordinators: Christophe ARAÚJO (Université Paris Nanterre), Céline VAZ (Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France)
Functions, mobility and networks of imperial procurators in the Roman West (late 1st century BC - 4th century AD)
Duration: January 2023 - June 2026
Coordinators: Anthony ÁLVAREZ MELERO (Universidad de Sevilla), Zheira KASDI (Université Paris 1 - Panthéon Sorbonne, AnHiMA)
Information to come
2. Circulation, migration, exchanges, networks
The aim of this research area is to bring together a number of research themes from different disciplinary fields, focusing on the structures of exchange links in order to analyze how the circulation of people, objects, ideas, knowledge, stories, works, techniques and beliefs form rationally or empirically organized ensembles that can be defined as networks on the scale of a "world-system".
Since the late 1990s, historiography and the social sciences as a whole have been profoundly marked by a so-called "global" approach to phenomena of interdependence and integration on a planetary scale, aimed at renewing our understanding of the processes of globalization over the long term.
By breaking the straitjacket of the Europeanist or European-centric and purely territorial approach, new horizons have opened up, focusing on the environment, circulation, exchanges and migrations, from a transregional or transnational perspective. Maritime and land routes are sources of wealth and prosperity, but they can also be paths of exodus or exile, a constant reminder of adversity, whether economic, political or environmental.
Analysis of Goya's networks and sociabilities (Europe, 1746-1828)
Duration: January 2026 - December 2028
Coordinators: Pierre GÉAL (Grenoble Alpes University), José Manuel MATILLA RODRÍGUEZ (Prado National Museum), Frédéric PROT (Bordeaux Montaigne University)
Animal colonization of the New World and its Iberian matrix (14th-early19th centuries)
Duration: January 2024 - December 2026
Coordinators: Philippe CASTEJÓN (University of Lille, Cecille), Arnaud EXBALIN (University of Paris Nanterre, Mondes Américains)
Mobilities, communities and the environment around the South China Sea (1560- 1700)
ResEFE
Duration: January 2024 - December 2026
Coordinator: Guillaume GAUDIN (Toulouse - Jean Jaurès University, FRAMESPA)
Mediterranean economies in the late Middle Ages (1350-1500): crises, reconstruction, restructuring
Duration: January 2024 - December 2026
Coord : Cédric QUERTIER (CNRS, LAMOP, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), Laurent FELLER (Université Paris 1 - Panthéon Sorbonne), Raúl ESTANGÜI GÓMEZ (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne / CSIC Madrid)
3. Heritages, legacies, rewritings
This line of research aims to approach the notion of heritage as a set of dynamic processes of transmission, selection and conservation of objects or immaterial productions, but also as a space of rewritings that recomposes the uses of the past to mobilize new collective relations of reinvestment or disaffection of remembrance.
Since the 2000s, with the rise of the digital world, the disciplinary field and institutional practices linked to the analysis of patrimonialization have been projected beyond the issues traditionally circumscribed to conservation and musealization, to give rise to an intense reflection that opens up the field of social sciences to many other external disciplines.
The recent emergence of an autonomous field of research, Heritage Studies, is thus founded on a post-disciplinary approach, which aims to be a crossroads of knowledge between law, anthropology, ethnology, history, archaeology, museology, art history and architecture. This institutionalization of heritage as a discipline of global knowledge is profoundly linked to the irruption of non-Western actors who claim a transnational and "subalternist" approach to questions of values linked to the manufacture of heritage.
Challenging analyses in terms of the relationship between Center and Periphery, the main intellectual figures in the current field of "heritage studies" are in fact at the cutting edge of a major turning point in contemporary thought, which is a "theory of the South", a Southern turn, undertaken from Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Comics, archive and critical literature: historiography of graphic narrative (1958-1992)
Duration: January 2026 - December 2028
Coordinators: Virginie GIULIANA (Université Clermont Auvergne), Antonio Lázaro-Reboll (University of Kent)
Silencio que grita. Cartografía colonial y pedagogías criticas
Duration: January 2026 - December 2028
Coordinators: Brice CHAMOULEAU (Université Paris 8), Jesús IZQUIERDO MARTÍN (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
Comparative study of French and Spanish scientific embassies to America in the first half of the 20th century
Duration: January 2025 - December 2028
Coordinators: David MARCILHACY (Sorbonne University), Antonio NIÑO (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
Present-day history, memory and emotions in Latin America and Spain
Duration: January 2022 - December 2026
Coordinator: Frédérique LANGUE (CNRS, Institut d'histoire du temps présent)
Statues, dissonant heritage and nation. Representations of identity at the Sorbonne in Paris and the Cité Universitaire in Madrid
Duration: January 2026 - December 2028
Coordinators: Carolina Rodríguez-López (Universidad Complutense de Madrid - UCM), Bertrand TILLIER (Université Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), José María FARALDO JARILLO (Universidad Complutense de Madrid - UCM)
La traducción de los clásicos y las letras españolas en la Edad moderna
Duration: January 2024 - December 2026
Coordinators: Mercedes BLANCO (Sorbonne Université), Roland BÉHAR (ENS-PSL), Miguel HERRERO DE JÁUREGUI (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Adrián M. IZQUIERDO (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Aude PLAGNARD (Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry)
Modern poverty and colonial indianness (Spain - Americas, 16th-18th centuries)
Duration: January 2026 - December 2028
Coordinators: Marie-Lucie COPETE (Université de Rouen Normandie - ERIAC), Juan Carlos ESTENSSORO FUCHS (Université Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle - CRAEC), Michèle GUILLEMONT (Université de Lille - CECILLE), Tomás A. MANTECÓN MOVELLÁN (Universidad de Cantabria - Grupo Mundus I+D+i), Philippe RABATÉ(Université Paris Nanterre / CRIIA / UMR FRAMESPA)
4. Creativity[ies]
The aim of the "Creativity[ies]" axis is to promote the emergence of collective projects led by international teams (French-Spanish/Portuguese with American or Mediterranean projections), specifically focused on artistic and cultural practices in all their dimensions, backed by scientific research.
Through these collaborative projects, the aim is both to enable researchers to develop a creative approach and artists to deepen their academic reflection, all within the same intellectual space. Particular attention to innovative activities that enable the tangible realization of this hybrid approach would be appreciated in the projects submitted (performative readings, visual or theatrical performances, exhibitions, etc.); publications resulting from the programs in this area may be included in the new "Amore artis" collection, be welcomed into the older collections, or appear in various sections of the institution's journal.
50 years of cinema at Casa de Velázquez (1973-2028)
Duration: January 2026 - December 2028
Coordinators: Mercedes ÁLVAREZ ROMÁN (Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M)), Julie AMIOT-GUILLOUET (CY Cergy Paris University), Nancy BERTHIER (Casa de Velázquez and Sorbonne University), Marianne BLOCH-ROBIN (Sorbonne University)
Cinema of Antiquity or the Archaeology of the Present
Duration: January 2025 - December 2027
Coordinators: Gwladys BERNARD (EHEHI - Casa de Velázquez, ArScAn), Pauline DUCRET (French School in Rome, ArScAn)
Miguel de Molina in his archives (1908-1993)
Duration: September 2024 - September 2027
Coordinators: Stéphanie DEMANGE (EHEHI - Casa de Velázquez / University of Toulon), Laurie-Anne LAGET (Sorbonne University, IUF), Alejandro SALADE (Fundación Miguel de Molina)
Archaeological excavations
Alongside these areas of research, Casa de Velázquez structures its archaeological policy around recognized multi-year programs and associated programs, carried out with local and European partner institutions.
These programs cover a variety of fields—from medieval archaeology to multidisciplinary research on ancient societies—and are part of a long-standing scientific collaboration between France and the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghreb countries, giving rise to a wide range of promotional and training activities: publication of results, organization of workshops, and contributions to events such as European Archaeology Days.
The diversity of the excavation contexts supported by the Casa de Velázquez also provides an ideal environment for the development and testing of innovative methods, ranging from archaeometric and environmental analyses to digital approaches (GIS, photogrammetry, 3D modeling), promoting new interpretations of the sites and societies studied as well as archaeological sciences in general.
Find out more about the Casa de Velázquez's archaeological missions
