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Dear ISHA people,

At last year's annual conference in Nijmegen ISHA first became
acquainted with CLIOHNET.

For those who have not heard of it before, CLIOHNET is a network of
history departments at universities accross Europe. The following quote
from their website explains:

"CLIOHnet is a Socrates-Erasmus Thematic Network formed to address the
task of bringing the study of history and a critically founded
historical perspective to bear on the challenges facing European
society and education today. Both as a research area and as a subject
widely taught and studied in Universities and schools at all levels,
history is undergoing a rapid transformation, often perceived as a
crisis. The Network utilises the remarkable opportunities created by
the swift expansion of contact between diverse European cultural and
educational traditions to bring a supranational, diachronic and
comparative approach to the study and teaching of history."

More information on CLIOHNET can be found on their website:
www.clioh.net

After the Nijmegen conference we established contact with CLIOHNET,
meeting with Professor Ann Katherine Isaacs, the central coordinator of
the network. It was quickly established that ISHA and CLIOHNET had many
goals in common, and could, particularly as we have quite different
origins and networks, work together on projects and provide each other
with expertise and contacts.

At the summer Council meeting in Turku and later in Dubrovnik we
discussed the possible ways in which we could work together, listing
the possible benifits and risks associated with cooperation with
CLIOHNET. The conclusion was that the benefits of cooperation outweigh
the risks, but that we should take care to maintain a clearly seperate
identity.

Buiding on these results we kept in touch with CLIOHNET, with the
preparations for the Helsinki conference giving a new impetus.

Now, after almost a year of preparations we have our first real
results:
- CLIOHNET has invited us to become a partner in their network as of
October 2003
- ISHA has been asked to attend the CLIOHNET Intensive Programme
(=conference) in Riga in May, both as participants in the academic
section, but also for talks with the the CLIOHNET coordinators on how
we could best collaborate concretely.
- CLIOHNET has generously offered to fund the travel expenses for a
representative to their conferences for the year 2003-2004

In return we connect our name to CLIOHNET and are expected to cooperate
where possible on international and national projects.

This represents a tremendous opportunity for ISHA. Not only does
cooperation with a SOCRATES project open doors to us and gives us a
certain prestige, there are far more concrete advantages. The CLIOHNET
Intensive Programmes and national meetings are attended not only by
staff from the participating universities, but also by their students.
With only a handful of exceptions, these participating universities do
not (yet) have an ISHA section. With active support from the university
staff, we should find these universities fertile recruiting ground for
new ISHA sections and people.

There are two Intensive Programmes scheduled for this year, in Riga and
a transnational meeting in Debrecen and Cluj-Napoca, and national
meetings in Sweden, Italy, Iceland, Ireland, Austria and Slovenia
(joint meeting), Bulgaria, Belgium and the Netherlands (joint meeting)
and Portugal. For more information on these meetings, see:
http://www.stm.unipi.it/programmasocrates/cliohnet/NEWS/news4/calendar.htm

It is clear that partnership with CLIOHNET has the potential of
ushering in a new era for ISHA. But it is equally clear that we should
not stumble in blindly. For that reason CLIOHNET will be top of the
agenda for both the Council meetings and the GA at the Helsinki
conference.

I would thoroughly recommend all those planning to attend the council
meeting to take a good look at the www.clioh.net website and so form an
informed opinion on partnership with this network. Before the
conference the IB will circulate more concrete proposals we can discuss
in detail at the meetings. However if you have any questions before
then, please do not hesitate to ask me or Lyyli for further
information.

Viva ISHA!

John