Past Times - Talking and Teaching History

Historian Brent Geerts (KU Leuven) joins the Past Times podcast to unpack his PhD research on how museums like the Africa Museum in Tervuren, Belgium and Belgium's Royal Military Museum shape the way students engage with colonial history. Geerts discusses the "emotional affective approach" to museum learning, the tension teachers feel between staying neutral and taking a stance, and why classroom visits to colonial heritage sites echo and complicate the emotional weight of history education.

Historian, educator, and EuroClio Board Member Juraj Varga joins the podcast to discuss Making Visegrad Histories Digital, a free online resource hub for teaching communist-era history across the Visegrad region, as well as plans for a new Central and East European teacher network within EuroClio. The conversation also covers Slovakia's new history curriculum and the recent controversy over the government's attempt to cancel Velvet Revolution commemorations, and what it sparked instead.

In this episode, Andreas Holtberget talks to Nayla Hamadeh about her motivations for founding the Lebanese Association for History (LAH) and its impact on history teaching in Lebanon as a post-conflict country following the civil war. Nayla and Andreas go on to talk about the current war on Lebanon and its implications for teaching and the importance of a teacher's community in times of conflict.
You can find Nayla Hamadeh in conversation with EuroClio founder Joke van der Leeuw-Roord in the Winds of Change podcast, and read more about her work in Lebanon in an interview with Bjorn Wansink on our website.

This podcast by Maastricht University student Alex Gonzalez Diaz discusses contested historical sites, Syncretismo in Guadalajara (2017), and Monumento al Mestizaje (Malinchismo) (1982) in Mexico City. It provides context and history of the monuments, introduces the actors involved in the contestation, and explores themes of syncretism and ethnic hybridisation. Syncretismo by Ismeal Varjas combines indigenous Aztec imagery with Mexican Catholic iconography, which created backlash and calls for the misuse of public funds after its inauguration. Monumento al Mestizaje was unveiled in 1982, created by Spanish-born artist Julian Martinez Soras, and was quietly relocated to a hidden park due to public disapproval. Monumento al Mestizaje depicts Mexico's infamous conquistador, Hernán Cortés, and his indigenous translator, viewed as the original traitor, La Malinche. Through analysing both sides of the contestation and the themes of syncretism and ethnic hybridisation, these public monuments explore questions of unity and identity as well as leftover legacies of settler colonialism within Mexico.

Contested Histories co-director Marie-Louise Jansen and Timothy Ryback, Director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation, joins our podcast to celebrate 10 years of the Contested Histories intiative. The intiative, now hosted at EuroClio, maps contestations and controversies over statues, memorials, street names and other representations of disputed historical legacies in public spaces. Together, our guests reflects on the origins of the initiative, the different kinds of contestetations and remedies that the intiative maps, and their use for (history) educators.