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Una Europa

Una Europa is one of the first European university alliances. It brings together eight major European universities: 

Una Europa’s goal is to form a truly European university environment, where excellence in interdisciplinary research is closely connected to transnational learning and to innovative problem-solving.

Based on their mission and values, the Una Europa partners have selected five Focus Areas to launch their collaboration. Each one fosters multi-disciplinarity and includes most of the studies offered at our universities. The Focus Areas act as initial thematic “glue” that ties our universities together in our mission to create a virtual campus.

  • Cultural Heritage
  • Data Science and Artificial Intelligence
  • European Studies
  • One Health
  • Sustainability

The Cultural Heritage focus area is supervised by a Self-Steering Committee (SSC) formed by academics from eight universities and coordinated by Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. The SSC of Cultural Heritage develops, implements and tests four main Joint Innovative Formats (JIFs) for education and mobility: a Joint PhD, Joint PhD Workshops, Lifelong Learning Certificates and CH Chairs. The JIFs aim at developing long-lasting collaborations not only between partner universities, but also with leading public, private and civil society stakeholders.

The Cultural Heritage focus area is developing four Transnational Research Teams, which gather professors, researchers, and Doctoral Candidates of Una Europa universities:

  • Heritage, Global Migration and Mobility
  • Heritage and the Digitization of Society
  • Social Capital, Mutuality and Volunteering
  • Safeguarding Cultural Heritage

The Cultural Heritage focus area is also nurturing various research projects funded with the frame of Una Europa and members of the alliance, especially:

  • PHOENIX – Parallel heritage of European universities, led by Alain Duplouy (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
  • UnaMuseums – Managing issues in running university museums and collections, led by Luca Zan (Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna)
  • CUTE – Cultural heritage at the edge: Stakes and opportunities of cultural heritage revitalization in European urban fringes, led by Maria Gravari-Barbas (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
  • MUSEUROPA – Local museums and European identities: heritage as a practice of belonging in Europe, led by Josephine Hoegarts (Helsingin Yliopisto)
  • CHANCES – Management of big data in cultural heritage: a dynamic shared solution, led by Rocco Mazzeo (Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna)

Among these research projects, the first two, PHOENIX and UnaMuseums, are specifically targeting university heritage. Universities provide a unique platform, indeed, upon which to debate and experiment with heritage. Many European universities are age-old institutions, sometimes rooted in medieval times, which are tasked with the curation of the knowledge of the past, its transmission in the present, and the invention of knowledge for the future. At the same time, universities themselves constitute a heritage, manifested tangibly in buildings and collections of objects, and intangibly in practices and traditions. How might this position as both subject and object of reflection enable universities to contribute to wider discussions about heritage across Europe?