Work
Research activity is certainly the core of the work of FSCIRE. Here young scholars have the possibility to study in an international environment, to complete their profiles and improve their abilities adopting the historical method and a diachronic perspective.
The work of FSCIRE could be described as a classic cooperative activity: each member carries out a specific research project, while participating in common pipelines or initiatives and sharing the same scientific rigor.
FSCIRE’s research has given rise to a vast publishing activity, which boasts a decade of collaboration with some of the most prestigious national and international publishers (among others, Il Mulino, Laterza, Treccani, Brill, Vendenhoeck & Ruprecht, Brepols) and which includes three journals and various series dedicated to the results of the team’s research or to the publication of editorial projects conceived and edited by FSCIRE.
The rigorous work of research for junior scholars is intended as an exclusive, full-time commitment, and it includes several activities, such as attending lectures of great masters, visiting centers of study abroad, participating in reading seminars on the classics of historiography. As a result, after the four-year course of perfezionamento scientifico, each student should be able to produce his/her own monograph. This will be the fruit of the continual discussion with other colleagues and elderly scholars working at FSCIRE, and, set in a broader horizon, it will bring a new contribution to the research in the historical-religious field.
The Dossetti and La Pira libraries, together with the newspaper and periodicals archive, play a major role in this work of research and research training, both as instruments of study, of rare completeness, and as instruments of service to the research system: a weekly meeting is used to choose, on the basis of reviews, the works to be purchased and to familiarize oneself with current production, trends and problems. Together with the library and the newspaper and periodical library, the archives – partly made up of originals and partly of copies – are a tool and a service for the internal and external scientific community, as are the audio and video materials of the media library.
Along with the research activity, over the years FSCIRE has also worked on building up a strong international network, which has resulted in several European projects and numerous forms of collaboration with international academic institutions.
