Professor Davide Rodogno  was invited as a keynote speaker to a three day event hosted by Villa Vigoni on 'Humanitarian Missions: An Italian-German Conversation on Europe, the United States, and the Global South in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century'. The conference analysed the history of humanitarianism and international development, and specifically looked at Europe, the USA, the Global South as regions of focus.

The keynote address given by Professor Rodogno encouraged young and more experienced historians to take a critical stance with respect to research in this field. More specifically, he called for greater resistance to historians' obsession with the quest for the 'origins' and of the 'birth of the modern'. Professor Rodogno instead emphasised continuities and changes, with a focus on the 1920s. He particularly expanded on the term 'rehabilitation' as a term and set of practices that - to some extent - anticipated development programs of the second half of the Twentieth Century.

Among the group of scholars invited to speak were Professor Dr. Marc Frey (University of the Federal German Armed Forces Munich), Dr. Silvia Salvatici (Università degli Studi di Milano) and Dr. Ilaria Scaglia (Ashton University, Brimingham), the latter of whom recently spoke at the Graduate Institute as part of the International History Departments annual Pierre du Bois Conference in October.

Keywords: International History; Department Faculty