Gilberto Fernandes

It is hard to say where my interest in history comes from but I know it has something to do having grown in Lisbon, Portugal. There, public memory is everywhere; the past is sovereign and the present its prince, and the writing of history is always either a coup or a barricade. It is no coincidence that so many of its political actors have been professional historians. Growing up in the first generation after the Carnations Revolution of April 25th, 1974, which rid Portugal of an authoritarian and colonialist regime that asserted its legitimacy on the nation’s “glorious past,” I learned to appreciate history as a fundamental venue for engaged citizenship, where power is reconstructed and challenged by way of public memory. In other words, I play for the historien engagé or active history team.

Whatever its provenance, my interest in history is fuelled by my love of story-telling and writing. Though governed by disciplinary canons, elaborate methodologies, and scholarly principles, good historical research demands a healthy dose of creativity and imagination. Not the imagination of the bard but of the detective, meticulously piecing together fragmented data, finding threads in seemingly disparate evidence, bridging gaps on the tracks with parallel clues, trying to understand what the world may have looked like from another person’s eyes, in a different time, place, and set of circumstances. At the same time, historians must maintain critical distance from their subjects in order to carry out sound analysis, connect with the larger picture, and recognize their own personal biases. Besides developing exceptional research, time-management, and problem-solving skills, along with a remarkable capacity for critical and independent thinking, self-discipline, self-direction, and educated intuition, good historians also need to be great oral and written communicators to synthesize large quantities of information into intelligible parcels of knowledge that can be shared with various publics.