Editorial – Luís Reis Torgal

Significant achievements sometimes begin, so to speak, with a simple, trivial or almost anecdotal fact. I supervised the doctoral theses of five students, all of them from outside the University of Coimbra, from other universities or colleges (one from Brazil), and obviously from different academic backgrounds. We met regularly and one day we came up with the idea of forming a formal research group, which we called SEIS20, because there were six of us, and our aim was to study the 20th century, based on interdisciplinarity.

I later coordinated the first international commission to evaluate the history centres of the FCT and I consolidated the idea of research units that we had at that time. It was in fact an idea of interdisciplinarity and, contrary to the emerging concept (in which people began to talk about “critical mass”, which implied the existence of large research teams), the creation of small, consolidated research centres and the exchange of ideas.

This experience, my participation in university juries in various fields (also due to the shortage of PhDs and, later, full professors in certain fields) and my visits to various countries, combined with the fact that the 20th century was coming to an end, led me to the project of creating an interdisciplinary and inter-university centre dedicated to the study of that century, although open to analyses of previous centuries and the 21st century, which was about to begin. CEIS20 came to fruition from this, and from a complex system of fundamental cooperation and a great deal of self-sacrifice.

From here we moved to an increasingly open centre with more research groups and more researchers, to the point where CEIS20, which stood for Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies of the 20th Century, recently became the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies, retaining its highly symbolic acronym. This is the only reference I would like to make at the beginning of this publication dedicated to the 25th anniversary of this institution. Above all, it should inspire all the members of the Centre to work on and create new, innovative and consolidated projects in which interdisciplinarity is affirmed, without forgetting the roots of our research group.

Coimbra, 8 November 2023

Luís Reis Torgal