Working on European cultural convergences and divergences through images

How did we become Europeans? What binds us together? What future keeps us together? This question has not been addressed through images – not only which images have circulated in Europe, are shared, and constitute a common imaginary museum, but also which images have had more influence than others, and how these images may have had this influence.

The aim of the « IMAGO » Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence is to understand how European cultures have blended through the international circulation of images. It is also to study to what extent images have been the crucible of European cultural homogenization, or reveal particular cultural and political differences. Nobody knows how images have fueled historical upheavals, modernization and Europeanization in the 20th and 21th centuries, before and after the advent of the Internet, nor which images have fostered eventual European convergences of taste, and according to which geography. Visual circulations pose also high challenges to the cognitive sciences and to visual studies.