The Scientific Advisory Council (SAC) ensures the academic, scholarly, and methodological quality of the Observatory’s work. It is consulted on the Observatory's programme and assists the Governing Board by delivering opinions on any other matter concerning the Observatory’s activities.
The Scientific Advisory Council - composed of 15 renowned persons in the field of history teaching and learning - is one of the Observatory's statutory bodies. SAC members are elected by the Governing Board for the term of office of two years, renewable once. To always ensure the presence of both experienced members with knowledge of existing working methods and the renewal of expertise, SAC members are elected at different stages. The next elections to the Scientific Advisory Council will take place in June 2025.
Ms Chara Makriyianni and Mr Raul Cârstocea have been serving as the president and vice-president of the Scientific Advisory Council since September 2021.
Ms Inês Fialho Brandão, Researcher, museum professional
She currently serves as Head of Mediation at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, in Lisbon, Portugal. Until 2021, she managed the Exiles Memorial Centre in Estoril, Portugal, which interpreted the lives and memories of the refugees who passed through Portugal between 1933 and 1945. Her publications focus on the interplay between museums and sensitive histories: 'Multiple voices on art and Islam'; 'Collecting for the Res Publica'; ‘What’s in Lisbon?’ Portuguese Sources in Nazi-era Provenance Research’; Who's who in Portuguese Museology (selected entries). She holds a PhD in History from Maynooth University, a M.A. in Near Eastern Studies/Museum Studies from New York University; and a M.A. History/History of Art (Joint Hons) from the University of Edinburgh.
In 2020, she was recognised by the Association of Portuguese Museology with the Museum Person of the Year Award. She is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Sousa Mendes Foundation.
Elected until June 2025
Languages: English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Lecturer in Twentieth-Century European History at Maynooth University, Ireland and Honorary Research Fellow in Modern European History at the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Leicester, United Kingdom. He has previously worked as a Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Leicester, Lecturer in European Studies at the Europa Universität Flensburg, Senior Research Associate at the European Centre for Minority Issues, and Teaching Fellow at University College London. He has held Research Fellowships at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies and the Imre Kértesz Kolleg Jena. A Romanian national, he is currently residing in Flensburg, Germany. He is a member of the Scientific Council of the international network ‘National Movements and Intermediary Structures in Europe’ (NISE). He is co-editor (with Éva Kovács) of Modern Antisemitisms in the Peripheries: Europe and its Colonies, 1880-1945 (Vienna, 2019). He is co-editor of the book series A Modern History of Politics and Violence at Bloomsbury.
Elected until June 2025
Languages: Romanian, English, Italian, French (written)
Arthur Chapman is Professor of History Education and Head of Department of Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, University College London. He holds degrees in History (BA) and Social and Political Science (MPhil) from the University of Cambridge and a Doctor in Education degree, in History Education, from the University of London. Arthur is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and an Honorary Fellow of the Historical Association. He is Editor-in-Chief of the History Education Research Journal, a managing editor of Teaching History, and Deputy Director of Public History Weekly. He is a series editor of the International Review of History Education (Information Age) and the UCL Press open access book series Knowledge and the Curriculum. Arthur taught history and related subjects for 12 years before moving into university history teacher education and history education research in 2005. He has worked at the universities of Cumbria and Edge Hill.
Elected until June 2026
Language: English
Mr Piero S. Colla, European Union official, professor of political sociology and researcher (University of Strasbourg, "Germanic and Northern European Worlds" laboratory)
Piero Colla is a historian and sociologist trained in Bologna and holds a doctorate from EHESS. He is a lecturer at the University of Strasbourg and a researcher attached to the AGORA laboratory. Since 2006, he has been an official of the European Economic and Social Committee (Brussels), and has worked in Paris, Stockholm and Luxembourg.
His research interests include the symbolism of the nation and collective identity, the cultural dimension of the welfare state in Scandinavia and the interaction between memory, school practices and curricula in history and civic education on a comparative level. On this last subject, he has been co-leading an interdisciplinary seminar in Paris for the past four years entitled "A crisis in the teaching of history in Europe? "(https://histeurope.hypotheses.org/). He is also the initiator of several collective works focusing on the comparison of history teaching experiences, especially in multicultural and minority contexts.
Elected until June 2025
Working languages: Italian, French, English / Conversational languages: Swedish, Spanish
Mr Erkan Dinç, Researcher, academic and teacher trainer
After obtaining a PhD degree from the University of Nottingham, he served as an academic and teacher trainer in various universities. He previously acted as a board member for the Board of Education and Instruction, an advisory body within the Turkish Ministry of National Education. Currently, he works as a professor of history and social studies education at Anadolu University. His research focuses on historical consciousness and the development of the learners' epistemological beliefs in relation to history. He is also interested in democratic citizenship and human rights education, and qualitative social research. Having proficiency in English, he authored a number of publications and took part in projects, including the Democracy Education Project funded and jointly implemented by the Council of Europe. Following and participating in the works of EuroClio and HEIRNET, he also acts as a country coordinator for the Korean War Legacy Foundation.
Associate Professor in Modern Irish History and a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, Anne Dolan is a historian of modern Ireland. Educated at University College Dublin (BA & MA) and with a PhD from the University of Cambridge, she is a member of the Government of Ireland's Expert Advisory Group on Centenary Commemorations. She is author of Commemorating the Irish Civil War: History and Memory 1923-2000 (Cambridge, 2003) and, with William Murphy, Michael Collins: the Man and the Revolution (Cork, 2018). With Cormac O’Malley she has co-edited ‘No Surrender Here!’: the Civil War Papers of Ernie O’Malley 1922-1924 (Dublin, 2007), along with many articles and book chapters. Her research centres around the history of violence in inter-war Ireland.
Ms Ann-Laure Liéval, Professeure agrégée of History & Teacher Trainer
Ms Ann-Laure Liéval is Professeure agrégée of History and Geography, teaching in the European English section at the Lycée Fénelon in Lille. She graduated from Artois University (Arras, France) with a Master in Ancient Greek History, and passed the Agregation externe d'Histoire in 2003 with Lille University (France). She also taught in Master MEEF2 at the University of Lille to future teachers, after having been a member of the jury of the external CAPES of History-Geography, and worked as a lecturer at Sciences Po Lille (Undergraduate college 1st year) for 5 years. She is a teacher trainer and is involved in several Erasmus + projects, all dealing with the teaching of contested and sensitive topics in History (Learning to disagree, Parallel Histories, Monumental challenges). Member of the APHG (Association des Professeurs d'Histoire-Géographie) Europe workshop, she is currently a Board member of Euroclio, a non-profit NGO and an international network of 84 associations of history teachers and trainers, which collaborates with the OHTE.
Elected until June 2026
Languages: French, English
Ms Chara Makriyianni, Educator
Dr Chara Makriyianni holds a Bachelor in Education (Hons), University of Nottingham; a Master of Arts in History in Education, Institute of Education, University of London; a PhD, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. She is a Founding Member of the Association for Historical Dialogue and Research, the Home for Cooperation and the CypRom Association in Cyprus. She served as a EuroClio Board Policy Officer and Council of Europe expert and trainer. She authored museum education programmes, history teaching and learning material. As a Teacher Educator at the Cyprus Pedagogical Institute, Chara coordinated the implementation of the New History Curriculum in primary schools of the Republic of Cyprus. A Fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Society and a Scholar of the Cyprus Fulbright Commission, she was shortlisted for the Grinnell College Young Innovator for Social Justice Prize. Currently, a Deputy Head Teacher at Faneromeni Primary School, she is also a EuroClio Ambassador.
Ms Bridget Martin, Secondary History Teacher & Teacher Trainer
Secondary History Teacher at the International School of Paris, Bridget also leads teacher training activities with EuroClio. She holds a Master of Teaching from the University of Melbourne as well as a Master of Arts (History) from the University of Groningen. She has produced peer-reviewed research on topics such as history curriculum debates and approaches to oral history in education. Holding Australian and Dutch nationality, Bridget is fluent in both English and French. Bridget began her teaching career in Australia where she was accredited at the Highly Accomplished level against the national professional standards for teachers. She has also worked in Indonesia, the Netherlands, and France. Following a period as History Teacher in Residence at EuroClio, Bridget continues to work with the organisation on various projects including as a member of the Teaching and Learning Team for their online learning platform, Historiana.
Alan McCully obtained Bachelor, Masters and PhD degrees from Ulster University, Northern Ireland and a Dip. Ed from the University of Edinburgh. Currently he holds an Honorary Research Fellowship in the UNESCO Centre, School of Education, Ulster University. Previously he was a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education, working, mainly, as a history teacher educator and researcher. Prior to that he taught history in a high school for twenty years. His research has focused on educational responses to conflict, the interface between history learned in schools and that encountered informally in communities in divided societies, and the teaching of controversial and sensitive issues. He has written extensively on these themes and is the author of over seventy publications including reports, a textbook, articles in academic journals and chapters in edited books.
Ms Elene Medzmariashvili, Academic historian, researcher and textbook author
PhD in World History, Professor of Tbilisi State University, and a Fulbright visiting scholar at Rutgers University (2005-2006).
She has nearly 50 years of experience in teaching and research, is the author of more than 80 works, including books, history textbooks and research papers on the topics of 20th century world history, didactics of history teaching, women's issues and more; the editor of a number of monographs, training resources and editorial board member of scientific journals.
She has taken part in many international projects, including those of EuroClio, which were aimed at building a democratic and tolerant society in Georgia and in the other countries of the region, as the coordinator and international editor. She is a co-founder of several non-governmental organizations in Georgia, among them the Georgian Association of History Teachers. Since May of 2022, she is also a Chairwoman of the Supervisory Board of IDFI Georgia.
Assistant Professor at the Chair for East-European History at the University of Basel, Switzerland, Olena Palko is a historian of Ukraine and modern Eastern Europe. Educated at Kyiv Taras Shevchenko National University, Ukraine, she holds a PhD in History from the University of East Anglia (UK). She has previously worked at Birkbeck College, University of London, and has held Research Fellowships at the Vienna Institute for Human Sciences, Humboldt University (Berlin), the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, and the Polish Institute for Advanced Studies. Olena Palko is a member of the Advisory Board of the Ukrainian Research in Switzerland (URIS). She is the author of Making Ukraine Soviet. Literature and Cultural Politics under Lenin and Stalin (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), and a co-editor of Making Ukraine: Negotiating, Contesting, and Drawing Borders in Twentieth Century (Montreal, 2022), and Ukraine’s Many Faces. Land, People, and Culture Revisited (Bielefeld, 2023). She is a co-convener of the Study Group for Minority History.
Professor at the Faculty of Languages, Cultures and Societies of the University of Lille and researcher at the Institut de Recherches Historiques du Septentrion (IRHiS, CNRS-Univ.Lille, UMR8529), he teaches contemporary German history. A former fellow of the Institut d'Etudes Avancées de Nantes, he taught for ten years at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder, and lives in Berlin. His work focuses on German-Polish and Franco-German relations, European borders and European memory cultures. He is co-editor of The European Way since Homer: History, Memory, Identity, 3 vols, London, Bloomsbury, 2021.
Mr Marko Šuica, Historian, educator and textbook author
His academic career as Serbian medievalist started and advanced at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade where he lectures as professor. He was coordinator of the Georg Eckert Institute project on History Textbook Research and Development in South-Eastern Europe from 2001 until 2004. Since 2010 he was engaged as an expert in intergovernmental projects and bilateral programs of Council of Europe’s History Teaching Unit. His domain of expertise includes medieval Balkan history, history didactics, curricula design and assessment. He is active in educational projects and teacher trainings on national, regional and international level. He is the author of several textbooks, additional teaching materials, education standards and history curricula. He is a consultant on Council of Europe anti-discrimination and national minorities programs, member of EuroClio and the International Society for History Didactics.
Karel Van Nieuwenhuyse is a professor at the Research Unit of History at the University of Leuven (Belgium) and Program Director of the KU Leuven School of Education. He earned his PhD in History in 2002. From 2002 to 2010, he combined secondary school history teaching with research and teaching assistant roles at KU Leuven. Since 2010, he has been a postdoctoral researcher and later an associate professor within the history teacher trainer programme at KU Leuven.
His research focuses on the history of history education and history didactics, particularly historical thinking. This includes the role of the present in history education, students' narrative representations of the past, and the use of primary sources and historical films. He has held visiting positions at UCL, the Georg Eckert Institute, the University of Coimbra, the University of Alberta, and McGill University.
Karel is president of the Flemish Association of History Teachers and vice-president of the International Research Association for History and Social Sciences Education. He serves on the editorial boards of several national and international academic journals and is the main editor of the book series ‘Historisch Denken’ (Historical Thinking).
