Synchronizing History Network
About
The Synchronizing History Network (SHN) is an international organization with an interdisciplinary historiographical approach. The SHN’s Scientific Committee aims to continue fostering a space for interdisciplinary and intergenerational dialogue on issues that, while grounded in the past, offer robust tools for overcoming methodological rigidities and cultural barriers to scholarly exchange among international and transnational academic communities. It seeks to promote a balanced and polyphonic approach to the world’s past that can support academic research, university teaching, and public-facing scholarship in an era increasingly marked by the tendentious instrumentalization of history in public arenas and the infosphere to sustain national and international political competition at a time when inequalities are widening and climatic conditions are deteriorating.
Synchronizing History Conferences
THE TIMES OF GLOBAL MODERNITY (C. 1450-1850): METHODS AND CASE STUDIES ON INTERACTIONS, IDEAS, AND IMAGINARIES
9–11 September 2026 • Milan, Italy
The third meeting of our project broadens its scope to encompass Early Globalization more fully, including its revolutionary and imperial reconfigurations. It adopts a periodization that extends from the late Middle Ages to the transition to the contemporary era. By welcoming scholars working on world interactions across these centuries, the Milan conference will build on the outcomes of the first two meetings and expand the network of researchers pursuing historical inquiry through both entangled and comparative approaches, and across micro- and macro-level contexts.
THE TRANSPLANTATION OF AMERICAN IDEAS IN EUROPE
17–19 September 2025 • Rio de Janiero, Brazil
The second Synchronizing History conference explored the transplantation of American ideas in Europe in order to give a proper idea of the impact of new ways of thinking about Global History from less Eurocentric perspectives that take into account the need to overcome unilinear conceptions of time and open space for approaches that consider different ‘visions’ of history and their distinct temporalities.
THE TRANSPLANTATION OF EUROPEAN IDEAS IN THE AMERICAS
18-21 September 2024 • Palermo, Italy
The first Synchronizing History conference shed light on the vast transplantation of European ideas in the Americas, paying particular attention to the methodological and theoretical aspects inherent in any analysis of this complex cultural movement. The conference’s organizers aimed to create a space in which historians and translation scholars can meet themselves in fruitful ways; the conference was designed to be a place for the creation of new approaches to history and translation or even, as recently argued, to history as translation. Indeed, historians and translators were invited to refine their methods and to intertwine their respective approaches with the aim of reaching a new and more comprehensive knowledge of the process which led to the formation of Western history.