The UAB to award historian Enzo Traverso an honorary doctorate

Italian historian Enzo Traverso will be awarded an honorary doctorate by the UAB, after being proposed for the special award by the Faculty of Arts & Humanities, in a ceremony which will take place on 26 November at 12 noon, at the conference hall of the Rectorat building. Traverso is one of today's most internationally renowned historians, particularly due to his contributions to cultural and intellectual history, and for the interdisciplinary nature of his works.

19/11/2024

The investiture ceremony will be presided by UAB Rector Javier Lafuente, with Francisco Morente and Pere Ysàs, professors in the Department of Modern and Early Modern History as the sponsors of Enzo Traverso. As is customary, the ceremony will include a performance by the UAB Choir. The event will be streamed live on the UAB's YouTube channel.

Traverso graduated in history from the University of Genoa and obtained his PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris in 1989, under the direction of Michael Löwy. Professor at the same École and at the Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint Denis, from 1995 to 2012 he was lecturer and researcher at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne, in Amiens. Since 2013, he has held the Susan&Barton Winokur Chair in the Humanities at Cornell University in the United States. He is specialist in the intellectual, cultural and political history of the 20th century and has studied issues particularly relevant to understanding Europe in the past century and, therefore, also Europe today. His works have become indispensable references in the field of contemporary history.

He has devoted special attention to the German and Central European intellectual world and, in particular, to the German-Jewish intellectual milieu. One of his most recent and outstanding contributions is a voluminous study on the intellectual history of contemporary revolutions, considered one of the most important works published in recent years. Traverso's work has also focused on other topics such as what he calls the “European civil war” period between 1914 and 1945, i.e., the two world wars and the interwar period, the question of totalitarianism, the relationship between memory and history, and the methodological and theoretical problems of historiography.

Characteristic of Traverso is also his constant dialogue with other disciplines such as sociology, political science and philosophy. Recurrent references and objects of analysis in his works are thinkers such as Hanna Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Anders Günther, Carl Schmitt, Max Weber, Pierre Bourdieu and Zygmunt Bauman, as well as literary figures such as Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, Paul Celan, Primo Levi and Susan Sontag.

The new honorary doctor is the author of more than two hundred publications including monographs (widely translated), book chapters and articles in academic and cultural references. As for his relationship with the UAB, Traverso began fifteen years ago to collaborate with the Department of Modern and Early Modern History, with the Centre for Studies on Dictatorships and Democracies (CEDID-UAB) and with the Research Group on War, Political Radicalism and Social Conflict (GRECS), working jointly with researchers and participating in conferences, courses and other academic activities.

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