Mission
We have set up the European Parliament History Network (EPHN) to coordinate and disseminate research about the history of the European Parliament, to circulate information via our newsletter, invite subscribers to online events, and collect information about recently published books, articles, and chapters, which meaningfully relate to our focus. We understand this focus to cover the European Parliament's history from the setting up of the Common Assembly of the European Coal and Steel Community up to the present-day; its internal politics including political groups, committees, individual MEPs, and the administration; horizontal and vertical cooperation and competition with other institutional and political actors within and beyond the EU's emerging political system and relations with citizens; and policymaking in any domain, whatever the EP's changing formal powers. We foster historical and social science research with a temporal perspective, as well as interdisciplinary cooperation.
Coordinators
Carine Germond is Professor of European Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. She has published extensively on the history of post-war European integration, particularly on the European Parliament, including the European People’s Party Group and the Committee on Agriculture, Franco-German relations and their role in European cooperation, the history of the Common Agricultural Policy, farm interest groups and CAP reform, and Euroscepticism.
Wolfram Kaiser is Professor of European Studies at the University of Portsmouth, UK, and Visiting Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium. During 2022-24 he was also the founding head of the European Parliament History Service (now HIST) inside the European Parliament. He has published extensively on the history and politics of the European Parliament including on the political groups and institutional reform, as well as on the history of Europe and European integration, including the role of the UK, Christian Democracy and early integration, technology cooperation and integration, and representations of "Europe" in museums.
Gilles Pittoors is Lecturer in Political Science at the Faculty of Social Sciences at KU Leuven, Belgium. His research interests include the interaction between national and European politics, multilevel and transnational party politics, the Europeanisation of national democratic institutions and practices, and European parliamentary democracy more generally. During 2022-24, he worked in the European Parliament History Service (now HIST), where he authored a series of briefings on the history of the direct elections to the European Parliament.
Ariadna Ripoll Servent is Professor for Politics of the European Union in the Department of Political Science and Academic Director of the Salzburg Centre of European Union Studies at the University of Salzburg, Austria, and Visiting Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium. She has published widely on European integration, EU institutions, informal decision-making processes, populism and Euroscepticism, and EU internal and security policies. Her extensive research on the European Parliament focuses on political dynamics in the civil liberties (LIBE) committee, inter-institutional negotiations and trilogues, Eurosceptic and populist MEPs in legislative work, and framing in plenary debates.
Umberto Tulli is Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the Department of Humanities and at the School of International Studies at the University of Trento, Italy. He has published extensively on the history of European integration, with a focus on the evolution of the European Parliament, the Cold War, and human rights, as well as the return of Italian and European foreign fighters to their countries between 1870 and 1970.