History and cultural heritage

The course promotes a qualified and innovative research activity in the field of historical-social sciences and cultural heritage, aimed at exploring the history of human societies, philosophical and literary contexts, geographical spaces, and the material and immaterial cultural production, specifically archaeological and artistic, over a time span from antiquity to the contemporary age. In the two curricula into which the course is divided: “Historical Studies” and “Studies for the knowledge, conservation, and narration of cultural heritage,” it offers training aimed at understanding historical and archival sources, archaeological testimonies, and artistic expressions from a perspective linked to knowledge, conservation, and narration. This requires their placement in a landscape marked by traces, memories, legacies, and also relies on the construction of such paths on disciplines and diagnostic and computer technologies.

Ph.D.s in Historical Sciences and Cultural Heritage are suitable for research activities at Italian and foreign universities, but also for positions at public bodies, superintendencies, restoration institutes, museums, private entities, research institutes, publishing houses, documentation, and cataloging centers. The acquired skills can provide further qualification for employment in the journalistic field, public communication, and cultural action.

Doctoral curriculum afferent to the doctoral course :

• HISTORICAL STUDIES:  The curriculum in Historical Studies promotes a training and research program focused on the study of interactions among societies, institutions, political systems, and cultural processes, with particular attention to the European space in its global interconnections. It encourages research on systems of thought, political and institutional cultures, identity constructions, socio-economic dynamics, and their implications from the medieval to the contemporary era. It fosters an analytical dimension that values a transnational and comparative perspective and multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches, also in the critical use of a wide range of sources (material, textual, figurative, manuscript, audiovisual, oral). The curriculum also pays attention to the field of digital humanities and to the narrations of history in contemporary media circuits through the practice of public history. The program’s goal is to train a new generation of scholars with high scientific qualifications, capable of operating both in the academic field and in other contexts of research and training, as well as in the cultural and creative sectors where history and memory contribute to the understanding, implementation, and enhancement of cultural heritage.

• STUDIES FOR THE KNOWLEDGE, CONSERVATION, AND NARRATION OF CULTURAL HERITAGE:  The curriculum related to studies dedicated to the knowledge, conservation, and narration of cultural heritage promotes advanced research in the field of cultural heritage sciences over a temporal arc that stretches from prehistory to our days. The main focus is on material and immaterial cultural productions and their places, within a disciplinary horizon that ranges from archaeology to art history, to problems of protection and conservation, to museology, restoration, archival science, literary philology, geography, history and culture of travel, to forms of enhancement. Following diverse methodologies, it develops novel and innovative research perspectives corresponding to the most recent achievements in the field. In particular, it experiments with the contribution of the most advanced technological tools on the assumption that they are an indispensable contribution to the knowledge and the challenge of conservation, protection, and communication of the historical memory that cultural heritage embodies in emblematic symbolic, material, and vital terms. The curriculum’s interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary vocation is not considered as a specialist juxtaposition, but as a genuine intersection of knowledge capable of generating a new interpretation of cultural heritage, as a relational, social, communicative, and shared good. The pathway thus develops heterogeneous lines within itself that testify to an inexhaustible field of study, in the conviction that the memories of the past, the traces of the present, and the places that inhabit them, return to each of us, in the most profound and inescapable sense, a sense of belonging.