Roundtable
Decentering the Study of U.S. History – A European Perspective

What changes when U.S. history is researched, taught, and debated from Europe? This opening roundtable explores how studying America from outside its borders reshapes historical inquiry, revealing new dimensions of familiar stories.

Drawing from partner institutes across Europe and beyond, our panelists examine how geographic distance and institutional positioning transform every aspect of historical practice. When scholars based in London, Berlin, Rome, or Prague investigate American history, they often encounter different archives, work in multiple languages, and operate within distinct academic traditions. These differences are not merely logistical—they reshape the very questions we ask and the stories we tell about diplomacy and empire, migration and religion, race and capitalism, environment and society.

Such shifts in perspective reveal the transnational networks and global contexts that national histories often obscure, while multilingual sources open pathways to voices and experiences that monolingual approaches might miss.

The roundtable also grapples with the pedagogical challenges and opportunities of this geographic positioning. How do we communicate American historical experiences to non-American contexts? How do we bridge different scholarly traditions and public expectations without losing complexity? European classrooms and publics become laboratories for testing how historical narratives travel across borders, offering fresh perspectives on American experiences while requiring different frameworks and raising different questions than the same topics addressed to American audiences.

Beyond methodology and pedagogy, the discussion addresses the institutional realities that shape international scholarship. Funding structures, academic career paths, and national scholarly priorities all influence which questions get asked and which stories get told. The roundtable considers both the advantages and limitations of studying American history from European institutional settings, acknowledging how these contexts simultaneously enable and constrain scholarly inquiry.

Participants will leave with concrete resources for multilingual and transnational research, strategies for framing comparative questions, and methods for communicating across national boundaries. More importantly, they will join a collaborative network of scholars committed to exploring what American history looks like when viewed from beyond America's borders. This roundtable introduces the seminar's central themes while modeling the kind of cross-border scholarly dialogue that makes such decentered perspectives possible.