While certainly not exhaustive, this feature aims to display only a sliver of the wide diversity of approaches to Europe in European studies, the many “Europes” that are studied and taught, and the fruitful collaborative endeavors that are central to the success and sustainability of the (inter)discipline―beyond EU studies and integration theories, but inclusive of them. From the cultural and spatial turns, to the relational turn that situates Europe vis-à-vis its outsides in complex ways entrenched in postcolonial legacies, European studies has successfully evolved into a transnational interdiscipline, albeit admittedly not without some imperfections. The study of Europe constitutes an exercise in constant zooming and dezooming, scale hopping, time travel, and border crossing (physical and intellectual) not only with regard to Europe as object of study, but to European studies itself, in a continuous process of self-examination and self-actualization. Let Europeanists look to the future and seize the opportunities that lie ahead to (re)fashion the field so it continues to partake in essential debates with which European societies are and will be confronted.
Hélène B. Ducros is Jean Monnet Chair of Research and Pedagogy at EuropeNow. Her work in human geography focuses on place-making, landscape perception, heritage preservation, and material culture, and has been published in Norois, The Journal of Sustainable Tourism, Island Studies Journal, Rural Tourism: An International Perspective (Cambridge Scholars, 2014), The Routledge International Handbook of Walking (2017), Explorations in Place Attachment (Routledge, 2018), and The Routledge Handbook on Place (2020).
Louie Dean Valencia-García is Assistant Professor of Digital History at Texas State University. He has served as a Lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University. He serves on the research editorial committee for EuropeNow. He is the author of Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain: Clashing with Fascism (Bloomsbury, 2018) and the editor of Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History: Alt/Histories.
