The Internationalization of Portuguese Historiography

I am unable to reflect upon the question of the internationalization of research into the history of Portugal and the output of Portuguese researchers without mentioning the experience I had when I decided to dedicate my research energies to the question of Portuguese history. The first intellectual and institutional contacts from which I benefited were those made with the team led by Antonio Hespanha at the Lisbon Institute of Social Sciences, and including Nuno Monteiro, Mafalda Soares da Cunha, Pedro Cardim, and Ângela Barreto Xavier. I immediately became associated with the work of certain intellectual circles that were highly regarded internationally. I encountered historians who enjoyed a long experience of academic exchanges. Additionally, some of them were accustomed to publishing in Europe and in the United States. The interdisciplinarity that had proved beneficial to an organization such as the Institute of Social Sciences, or ICS, was evidently connected to this familiarity with international exchanges. My first steps in undertaking an academic exchange at Lisbon’s New University were made easier by the warm welcome I was given by the historians Diogo Ramada Curto, Francisco Bethencourt, and Rita Costa Gomes. In my experience, the capacity of Portuguese historians for engaging in international dialogue has always been regarded less as a problem and more as a simple fact of life.