About the society

The working group Geschichte und Region/Storia e regione was founded in Bolzano/Bozen in 1990 with the aim of intensifying regional historical science and promoting scientific exchange across regional and language borders.

The eponymous journal supports this goal as a historiographical publication since 1992. In addition, the working group organizes international conferences as well as book presentations, discussion events, and movie nights to introduce historical topics to a wider audience. It also coordinates research and book projects.

The efforts of Geschichte und Region/Storia e regione have always been aimed at breaking up the narratives of traditional national history, in part by continuously renegotiating regional fields of research using new methodological approaches. In this context, the term “region” does not refer to a firmly defined geographic space claiming equal validity for all historical research questions and all time periods. Rather, the society’s approach views “region” as a spatially flexible concept that can be used to comprehend specific historical phenomena depending on the selected perspective and/or era.

With cooperation that transcends language borders, Geschichte und Region/Storia e regione also hopes to overcome the historical narratives characterized by historical-cultural ethnic monadism, thereby facilitating a unified and shared perspective onto historical Tyrol. Furthermore, Geschichte und Region/Storia e regione has also established itself as a platform for comparative regional history beyond the Alpine area, offering German-language and Italian-language historical science possibilities for exchange.

Details on the development and the work of Geschichte und Region/Storia e regione are compiled in the interim report by Hans Heiss published in “Geschichte und Region/Storia e regione 21 (2012), 1-2.”