EAHN @ SAH

At the 64th Annual Meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians (New Orleans, 13–17 April 2011) the EAHN, represented by Alona Nitzan-Shiftan and Tom Avermaete, hosted an information session where the different activities of the EAHN were presented.

After this presentation there was a discussion with participants, which illustrated that there is ample enthusiasm for the EAHN’s activities and that the First International Meeting of the EAHN in Guimarães, Portugal, was considered a valuable complement to its North-American counterparts. Especially the concise character of this first international meeting, as well as the related possibility for scholarly exchange and debate, were highly appreciated. There was a general agreement that standards have been set and there are great expectations vis-à-vis the Second International Meeting in Brussels in 2012.

During the discussion several issues were raised that will be the base for further reflection within the EAHN’s board. A first one regards the activities of the Ranking Committee. While acknowledging the importance of ranking architectural journals correctly in international citation indexes, critical voices were raised about the compliance to standards that were introduced for the sciences and are now bluntly applied to the humanities, including architectural history and theory. Questions were asked about the ambition of the Ranking Committee to produce a critical statement about the specificity of research output in the field of architectural history and the necessity for adjusted ways of evaluating this output.

A second issue concerns the involvement of graduate students within the EAHN. It was noticed that at the moment the organization has no special forum for graduate students. Some of the participants argued that the increasingly growing community of advanced master students and PhD candidates is in need of a platform for exchange and debate. It was suggested that the EAHN might be an excellent organization to host such a platform.

The engaged discussion and positive reactions by SAH attendees are encouraging and will help us in the further elaboration of EAHN activities. We hope that the EAHN session at the SAH Annual Meeting will become a tradition and—now as in the future— engender vivid debates on the role and activities of a professional organization in the field of architectural history.