PREMIUM Project: European Parliament: Collecting Memories
In 2019 it will be forty years since the first direct elections to the European Parliament (EP).  To mark the occasion, a group of five former EP officials, decided that the anniversary offered an ideal opportunity to collect the memories of parliamentarians active during these years to get their evaluation of the successes and failures of the institution.
The group conducted oral interviews with former Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) since the summer of 2017 but wanted to disseminate the findings to a larger audience.
This is where the PREMIUM group of talented Master students comes in.  They scanned and listened to all the interview data, participated in some of the interviews with MEPs and developed analytical categories to categorise the interviews. This makes searching the material easier, both for citizens and researchers. Students also were in touch with the historical archives in Florence which hosts the website on https://archives.eui.eu/en/oral_history#CM_EP. Christine Neuhold acted as the project mentor.
The  material feeds into academic work. A book entitled Shaping Parliamentary Democracy: Collected Memories from the European Parliament is currently being finalised with Palgrave in the Pivot series and will be published by the middle of 2019.
Christine Neuhold and the group of former officials: Alfredo De Feo, Francis Jacobs, Gerard Laprat, Dietmar Nickel and Michael Shackleton presented and discussed insights and findings on the European Parliament at a Conference marking the 40th anniversary of the direct elections of the EP, in November 2018 at the European University Institute in Florence.