The famous European Solidarity Centre in Gdansk, Poland, has been the venue for the HERA Joint Research Programmes (JRP) «Uses of the Past» and «Public Spaces» Conference on the 11th and 12th of September 2019. Some members of the BESTROM Consortium (María Sierra, Eve Rosenhaf, Anna G. Piotrowska, Juan Pro, Tamara West and Begoña Barrera) attended this conference, which aimed to showcase the research being undertaken by HERA funded projects and to raise the profile of the Humanities among national research councils and the EU.

It is the aim of BESTROM not only to generate scholarly publications but also to develop other kind of outputs like plays or storytelling performances. This is why our recent partnership with Aus den Akten auf die Bühne results such a good news.

AdA is a German project that combines historical and dramaturgical work making source-based research on a current topic accessible to a broad audience. The Bremen historian Dr. Eva Schöck-Quinteros is currently developing this concept with the support of the actors of the Bremer Shakespeare Company (BSC) whose director, Peter Lüchinger, is responsible for the dramaturgical design and artistic realization of AdA performances.

BESTROM Consortium held its Launch Seminar at the Institute of Musicology of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow on June 19^th and 20^th 2019. The main objective of this first seminar was to share an overview on the first steps to be taken in the following months. To this purpose, we were briefed about the last updates of our four areas of research (Citizenship, Music, Fairs and Circus) by a member of the team in charge and we discussed a common ground for the inquiry lines.