EURECA’s History Day 2025

EURECA’s History Day 2025 took place on Tuesday, 25 February and consisted of 19 student presentations. Panels focused on conflicts in Mandate Palestine, the historiography of imperialism and anticolonial movements, precolonial and contemporary African history, US politics, expansion and imperialism and the building of the High Dam in the 1960s and its effects on the Nubian people. 

There was a good number of highly engaged audience members throughout the day. An outstanding feature of the presentations was the student-researchers’ critical engagement with primary sources, including newspaper articles, photographs, postcards, private correspondence, hagiographies, maps, participant-histories, speeches, letters to the editor, diplomatic records and a variety of archival documents.

Over lunch, a student from the "Why History?" course delivered a special presentation using oral history to narrate, validate and honor certain aspects of the career of his grandfather, Ali Eloui Abdel Ghafour Bastawi. Oral history sources produced a fascinating analysis of the politics of medical education at Cairo University since Bastawi confronted President Nasser with the urgent need to reform the study of dentistry, encapsulated in the story of an encounter between a young, disgruntled dentistry student and the greatest political figure in modern Egyptian history.