Francisco José Díaz Marcilla

Profile picture for user lahistoriaesunaciencia@yahoo.es
Universidade Nova de Lisboa
entangled/connected history
Biography and/or project

I am currently working in my Postdoctoral project on Historiographical Narrative (Medieval Chronicles) at the University NOVA of Lisbon (Portugal). I have obtained my PhD with the thesis “Towards a New Model of Historical Interpretation: the Contributions of Social Sciences to the Study and Understanding of History”, with a concentration on the relationship between history and other social sciences. After completing my undergraduate studies I had continued my training as a medievalist attending several courses, conferences and lectures, and at the same time completing a Master’s degree from the Pontifical Antonianum Atheneum of Rome (Italy). Looking at the differents ways of ruling the History like science, I have changed my philosophical background. A historian needs to think about what kind of History he would like to study and to write. In the first part of my thesis, I critically analyzed the relationships that had taken place between historians and other scientists from other social sciences. Thus, I tried to show that this kind of exchanges, though rare, has enriched interdisciplinary relationships and can greatly enrich the role of historians in the future. In the second part of the thesis I have inspected the different contributions made by psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists that could be used by historians; I have studied and developped how other sciences could be adapted to the field of history; and finally, I have looked at the myriad of concepts and theories that can be accommodated for historical research. The example used to explain all these ideas was the “Cancionero de Baena”, a XVth century Spanish poems collection.