Editorial – by Augusto Aguiar Branco

The creation of the Centre for 20th Century Disciplinary Studies (CEIS20) in 1998 brought a new and much needed multifaceted methodology to Portuguese academia. Scientific production on the recent past, as a result of research, opened itself to interdisciplinarity, to the intersection of perspectives and ways of thinking. As in the economic world, the accentuated division in scientific work had led to the proliferation of piecemeal knowledge that failed to see the whole or, at best, produced global syntheses through a single lens and a single way of looking at things. While interdisciplinarity has for some time been a fashionable, almost magical formula, it is true that, having somewhat lost the sacred aspect of being able to explain everything, it remains a stimulating challenge. It’s almost obligatory, as a counterpoint to the inevitable relegation of the scientific object to any narrow field that is difficult to justify in terms of its interest or impact on society.

Since the creation of CEIS20, the Eng. António de Almeida Foundation has been attentive to this new impetus from the University of Coimbra.

I would divide the Foundation's support for CEIS20, after more than two decades, into three vectors, necessarily very briefly: support for publications, support for colloquia and support for the research group "Europeism, Atlanticism and Globalisation".

Support for CEIS20 publications has benefited the following publications: the CEIS20 journal “Revista Estudos do Século XX” from its first issue (“Estéticas do Século”, 2002) to issue 13 (“Estado Providência”, 2013); the collection “Estudos Sobre a Europa”, from issue six (“Mare Oceanus. Atlântico – Espaço de Diálogos”, 2007) to issue nine (“2009: (Re)Pensar a Europa”, 2010); the first issue of the collection “História Contemporânea” (“Estados Novos: Estado Novo”, 2009), and other non-periodical or collection publications such as “Calvet de Magalhães – Pensamento e Ação” (2015) and “Europa, Atlântico e o Mundo: Mobilidades, Crises, Dinâmicas Culturais e Identitárias. Estudos para Maria Manuela Tavares Ribeiro” (2017). The Foundation also supported the publication of the proceedings of colloquia and congresses, so many in fact that I won't list them all, except for the last one, the International Colloquium entitled “Two Centuries of the 1820 Revolution: Liberalism, Anti-Liberalism and Post-Liberalism” (2020).

The Foundation has also supported many of the colloquia and seminars organised by CEIS20. Its Chair has been invited to be part of the Honorary Committee, as in the case of the colloquium “Portugal-Brazil: An Interdisciplinary View of the 20th Century” in 2003. The themes of the initiatives supported included totalitarianism, contemporary architecture, Portuguese and European geopolitics, regional political autonomy, Europe's Atlantic dimension, cultural heritage and museums. A final event worth mentioning was the International Colloquium “The Year 1917…”, in 2017, a nod to the Russian Revolution.

The last aspect is the support to the research group “Europeism, Atlanticity and Globalisation”. In addition to funding the initiatives, the Foundation has also sponsored the researchers’ trips abroad. This type of support is sometimes difficult to obtain through the Portuguese university system.

One of the benefits of interdisciplinary studies is knowledge that transcends the limited fields of the objects of study and the potential impact on society. Let me add a third benefit.

Today's knowledge itself is "networked", without a fixed point of support. It doesn't have a single root, but several, like different branches growing around an imaginary tree without a trunk. Classical narratives, with a fixed order, have lost much of their explanatory value, which literature and the other arts perhaps predicted, even before the social and human sciences.

That is why a centre for interdisciplinary studies of the 20th century is all the more relevant in the 21st century, always supported by the Eng. António de Almeida Foundation.

Augusto Aguiar-Branco