There is no good teaching without research, and the other way around – there is no good research without displaying one’s findings and hypotheses to a student audience. It is difficult but very important to translate research into clear teaching questions and demonstration, notably when the ambition is to deliver an interdisciplinary approach, to discuss up-to-date scholarly literature and research inquiries and methods, and to contribute to debates on “modernity”, identities and nationalism in contemporary Europe. How to avoid methodological nationalism and go beyond nation-centric historiography and, at the same time, account for the local specificities in (historical) developments are difficult yet key tasks. The members of the “How to Teach Europe” program have achieved this goal: innovating university curricula in line with ongoing scholarly reassessments of nation-centric historiography and public narratives.

Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, European academic life is less unified than we could have hoped for. Selfishness in the West and structural problems in the East still prevent European higher education and research from functioning as a truly common resource. That is where an initiative such as the “Teaching Europe” program displays its scientific and scholarly potential: two research institutions from “peripheral” Europe have filled a unique, globally visible intellectual space at the very “centre” of our common culture and values.

Europe as a political, cultural and economic structure will remain an abstract and intangible concept unless its value acquires a narrative or visual shape. Coordinated by the New Europe College in Bucharest and the Centre for Advanced Study in Sofia, the “Teaching Europe” project has developed new concepts and innovative proposals that aspire to teach Europe in such a creative manner to students in the classroom. I very much welcome this initiative and am certain that this inspiring project will trigger similar endeavours in many other regions of Europe.