Members of the European Community Studies Association (ECSA) convened at the UIC between Thursday and Saturday, 10-12 May 2012. The meeting was called by Enrique Banús, the president of the association, a professor in the UIC Faculty of Humanities and the director of the UIC Charlemagne Institute for European Studies (ICEE).
This was
the first global meeting of the ECSA and, as Banús pointed out, “the start of a
very promising project”. ECSA was founded in 1987 with the aim of establishing
relationships between European universities and improving links between the
European Union and the rest of the world.
About 60
people from all over Europe and countries such as Japan, South Korea, India and
Chile spent the conference days attempting to put the current state of European
studies into a global context.
In total,
there were two days of talks during which the guests learned about the work under
way in the European Union and the rest of the world. A clear example of this
work was presented by one of the conference guests, Professor Kubo Hiromasa
from Japan, whose ECSA group has been working on European studies since 1980
and has 500 researchers dedicated to the field.
Other
examples were described in the talks given by Professor Mark L. Entin from
Lomonosov Moscow State University; Rajendra Jain, the president of ECSA India;
Dohoon Kim, the vice president of ECSA South Korea; and Professor Cristina
Silva, the president of ECSA Chile. All of the sessions provided unmistakable
evidence of the development of European studies throughout the world.
The meeting
concluded with a talk on the opportunities presented by new technologies and
the future of European studies.
