A new podcast explores the borders of the province between past and present
Shifting Borders is a bilingual podcast produced by Geschichte und Region/Storia e regione and the Center for Autonomy Experience, Eurac Research, Bolzano.
The aim is certainly not to redraw historical boundaries, but rather to explore borders in their linguistic, geographical, social and gender dimensions. It is worth looking beyond the many borders that shape our everyday lives. By looking back at the past, new perspectives on the present can emerge.
Over the course of five episodes, Lorenzo Vianini casts a glance at the past through interviews with various historians. Accompanied by the voice of Adina Guarnieri, he asks what influence linguistic borders have on the way the past is perceived, and investigates how the boundary between humans and nature has shifted through the process of modernisation. Also significant are stereotypical gender boundaries, which shed light on how women’s, gender and queer histories have changed between the early modern and contemporary eras. And, not least: why do the borders between present and past blur within the culture of memory?
The series opens with Hans Heiss and Giuseppe Albertoni, who were present at the founding of Storia e Regione/Geschichte und Region more than thirty years ago. The first episode focuses on the 1990s as a period of renewal in historiography, spanning the beginnings of the journal and the challenge of breaking away from the conventional frameworks of South Tyrolean historical writing.
Episodes
The first episode will be available on all major podcast platforms from Wednesday 24 September 2025. The following episodes will be released every two weeks until 19 November.
Each episode features one interview in Italian and one in German, accompanied by short summaries in the other language to aid understanding.