1st cycle teaching range:

The IEM will again this year be providing, in both semesters and up to a limit of 3 students per semester, the “Atelier de Iniciação à Investigação (I e II)” (Initiation to Research Workshop (I and II)) as optional CUs. These workshops aim at integrating undergraduate students into projects taking place at the IEM, thus promoting their active insertion in the world of research work.

It also opens the opportunity to collaborate on three projects with great impact: the project CISTERHOR – Studying and characterising a scriptorium medieval (1 vacancy), the project Diplomats and Diplomacy – Travel and Travellers (1 vacancy) and the project we are carrying out in collaboration with Princeton, to complete the iconographic database with Portuguese materials (1 vacancy). Thus, this seeks to enable undergraduates with vocations for medieval studies to be introduced to everyday research.

With 6 places available, the CU “The Digital Humanities Applied: Exploring Medieval Text and Culture“, to be taught in English, integrates into the research project on the work of Fernão Lopes, relying heavily on the portal named after the Portuguese medieval writer and historian. Students will be able to focus on the intersections between Literary and Historical Studies based on the content of Lopes’ chronicles about the Portuguese kings, or relate more classical approaches to the Humanities with contemporary digital approaches: are the digital humanities a point of arrival or departure? Simultaneously, students will be introduced to the Fernão Lopes Portal to get acquainted with the structure of a real and working example of the digital humanities media. This approach combines recurrent usage of the portal for structuring issues and thereby presenting relational database fundamentals, terminology, text mapping, multimedia integration and curation. Through group classes and individual tutorials, students are expected to hone the tools necessary to develop their own individual projects based on a theme, a subject, or a fragment of the Fernão Lopes chronicles. The results will then be included on the website.

The CU History (medieval and modern) and archives within the framework of the European Research Council project 819734 “VINCULUM. Entailing Perpetuity: Family, Power, Identity. The Social Agency of a Corporate Body (Southern Europe, 14th-17th Centuries)“, with 10 available places, is divided into two blocks – lecturing (on the project theme, on archivistics/Historical Archivistics and on AtoM software) and practical work. In the second block, students 1) read previously selected documentation (printed or manuscript) and introduce the data into the project’s database, which follows archival and diplomatic description norms, following the protocols and procedures of normalisation and correction of the database carried out operated by the project team; 3) in group, they produce a “Link of the Month”, to then be published on the project’s website.

Finally, the CU “Cultura Medieval Ibérica” (Medieval Iberian Culture), with 25 places available, is designed for the Spanish Studies option in the Degree in Languages, Literatures and Cultures, and for the area of Medieval Studies in the Degree in History and Archaeology. The program focuses on medieval Iberian culture as the field, at the level of undergraduate degrees and regarding the different kingdoms of contemporary Spain (Castile, Navarre, Leon, Crown of Aragon, Granada), is poorly represented. This CU seeks to improve knowledge on Spanish cultural history and is taught in Spanish. Moreover, the CU complements the “cultural” strand of the field of study linked to the LLLC’s Culture block and the study of medieval history. This therefore provides a specific space for the teaching of medieval Spanish literature and culture, which enables the acquisition of knowledge about the first writings in vernacular languages (Castilian, Galician, Catalan, Basque and Arabic), whether poetic, narrative or philosophical in content.

2nd cycle teaching range:

This year we also run the two “Ateliers de Investigação (I e II)” (Research Workshops (I and II)) for 2nd cycle students (in both semesters), in which 8 selected Master’s Degree students are able to work actively as researchers on the History, History of Art, Literature and Archaeology projects hosted by the IEM.

Additionally, 6 places are available for the CU History (medieval and modern) and archival studies within the framework of the European Research Council project 819734 “VINCULUM. Entailing Perpetuity: Family, Power, Identity. The Social Agency of a Corporate Body (Southern Europe, 14th-17th Centuries)”, where students will, after a lectured block focused on archivistics/Historical Archivistics and the software AtoM, read previously selected documentation (printed or handwritten); 2) introduce the data in the project’s database, which follows archival and diplomatic standards of description, following the protocols and procedures of database normalisation and correction carried out weekly by the project team; 3) research a link or set of links (with autonomous justification of the selection criteria, and taking into account the research themes of the project) and finally produce a 15-page paper, which firstly reflects on the constitution of the document exhibited and then analyses its historical background.

Check out the contents of these CUs on the FCSH website and come and investigate and study with us!