12/16/2020 8:40 PM
Clarín.com
Culture
Updated 12/16/2020 8:47 PM
Historian and researcher Luis Alberto Romero received the
Ñ Award for Career
on
Wednesday night
at a ceremony at the Fernández Blanco Museum.
"This lifetime achievement award is a reminder of what happened in my life, but I had better think about looking at what I did in my life as a historian, also what I did not do, the choices on which way to go, the way in which the path is made by walking, "said Romero as soon as he received the recognition.
"The result of many decisions, often circumstantial, resulted in having built myself a place of
intermediary between the academic world and the public world.
Regarding the former, I believe that I fulfilled almost all my obligations: teacher, researcher, wrote articles, directed thesis. , I belong to two academies. On the other dimension, I believe that
I am what in the XIX century was called a publicist
and in the XX century a public historian ", considered Romero.
Minutes earlier,
Matilde Sánchez
, general editor of Ñ magazine, highlighted that "at a time when few intellectuals or essayists gave way to the mainstream media in Romero's columns, I always found a conviction erudite and accurately displayed through pedagogical images for complex issues and, not least, an effective use of irony to that scathing relish that causes us to smile and always admire intelligence ".
In this sense, Romero also added: "I wrote a story aimed at a wider audience, I chose a genre, the interpretive synthesis,
I chose to point to the present, to
reach out to what is happening with a historical gaze and glimpse what may happen. I wrote often on politics, with the support of a historian, but with a lot of opinion. I have a fascination for journalism and the publishing world. I wrote many short stories in Clarín. I began to write in 1976 in the newspaper, commenting on books. I directed many series of fascicles , many written by me, I write regularly in the Opinion section and I collaborate in Ñ, a culture magazine, which is addressed to the educated public, informed interested in understanding, to whom I speak. I feel moved by this distinction that comes from one of those worlds that interest me. "
Luis Alberto Romero, Ñ Award for Career.
Screenshot.
Born on October 15, 1944 in Buenos Aires, he has distinguished himself as a professor of History at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and has taught postgraduate courses at the Torcuato Di Tella University and at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences.
He was the main researcher at Conicet until 2014. In 2005 he founded the Center for Political History Studies, at the School of Politics and Government of the National University of San Martín, which he directed until 2011. In 2016, he was named “Outstanding Personality of Culture ”Of the City of Buenos Aires, by the Buenos Aires Legislature.
"I am moved by this distinction that comes from one of those worlds that interests me."
Luis Alberto Romero Historian
Among his books, stands out
Brief contemporary history of Argentina
(published by the Fondo de Cultura Económica), a classic almost mandatory reading among students and young people who seek to learn the facts of recent Argentine history.
It was published for the first time in 1994 and since then it has had multiple reissues and extensions.
In the last one, the author unfolds a temporal arc that spans one hundred years, between 1916-2016.
There he goes through the economic, social and political vicissitudes of the country, analyzes central events of the different governments, from Yrigoyenism to Kirchnerism.
His journalistic notes show
a line of thought critical of populisms and a defender of liberal republicanism and democratic socialism.
He has been obsessed with a topic for years: the long Argentine crisis, whose knot is, according to him, in the structure of the State and its decline.
He often quotes a great phrase from Max Weber: "The State is the place where a society thinks of itself."
Luis Alberto is the
son of the renowned Argentine historian José Luis Romero
, who brought to these lands a "French" way of understanding history as
"social history"
, and who accepted an enormous responsibility in difficult times: the rector of the UBA, after the Perón's fall in 1955. In his honor, Romero Jr. has recently created the portal “José Luis Romero-Obras Completas”, a years-long project, carried out with the support of the University of San Andrés.
His daughter, in turn and following the family tradition, is also a historian.
His journalistic notes show a line of thought critical of populisms and a defender of liberal republicanism and democratic socialism.
The forcefulness of a prolific work, made up of more than 20 books and hundreds of articles, as well as his role as principal investigator in the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (Conicet), from which he retired in 2014, make
Luis Alberto Romero
one of the most relevant contemporary historians of Argentina
and the region, as well as a virtuous multiplier of academic spaces, study centers and spaces for debate.
The historian Luis Alberto Romero.
Photo to Fernando De la Orden.
"My method is to think that the present is the last frame of the film that comes from the past and try to think what this has to do with the above."
Having defined his scientific work,
Luis Alberto Romero
, dean of contemporary Argentine history, resorts to apparently simple images in which the tensions of the complex are linked.
A stamp that runs through his prolific work and also covered the classes he gave for almost a quarter of a century at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and that those students, who became their colleagues, remember as masterful.
In 1969,
Romero
published his first book,
The Military
Coups, 1812-1955.
He had graduated as a professor of History from the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the UBA just the previous year with just 24 years.
If he was known then, it was due to his father,
José Luis Romero
(1909-1977), whose name will remain forever associated with the birth of Social History in the country in the mid-1950s.
“I have already accepted that I have nothing original, I am a minor version of my father.
Every time I think an idea occurred to me, I reread and I see that he had already said them, "he told Clarín three years ago and, with a sense of humor, he completed the (hateful) comparisons with a football metaphor according to which his father It is like Barcelona and him, just Racing de Avellaneda, which has given him several joys and not a few regrets as a supporter.
His extensive teaching career began just before graduation, as a modest assistant for practical work in the field founded by his father and entitled "General Social History" at the UBA.
It was 1967 and those first classes would be followed by others at the School of Sociology of the Universidad del Salvador and at the University of Lomas de Zamora, in the 70s;
at the University of Belgrano and as professor of Argentine History I at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, in the '80s;
and his dissertations at higher levels, which he still offers, in the postgraduate degrees in Social Sciences, of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) and in History of the Torcuato Di Tella University.
Among his books, "Brief contemporary history of Argentina" stands out, a classic almost compulsory reading among students and young people who seek to learn about recent events in Argentina.
An adjusted list should not omit the Study Program in American Economic and Social History (PEHESA), which he founded in 1978 with Leandro Gutiérrez, Hilda Sabato and Juan Carlos Korol;
the Center for Political History Studies, at the School of Politics and Government of the National University of San Martín, which he inaugurated in 2005 and led until 2011;
or the Buenos Aires Program for Political History, created by him in 2006, while teaching specialization courses in Chile, Mexico, Brazil, Spain, as well as at the École d'Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in France, and the Graduate Center from the City University of New York, in the United States.
However,
its name multiplied exponentially
among high school programs and university backpacks as of 1994, when
his book
Brief contemporary history of Argentina
was published by the Fondo de Cultura Económica
.
The cover with a stormy sea and at the same time luminous under a stormy sky, true to its style of simple images, anticipated those students and those to come and those to come and those to come, that Argentine history was anything less brief and peaceful.
Rosemary.
Order Photo
“I personally had the 'misfortune' of writing a book that sold very well and then
every so often I had to add a chapter to it
and there I realized that what I was thinking at that time did not connect very well with the above and later ”, has told Romero with sympathy about his undisputed classic, to which he had to return on more than one occasion.
First, in 2001, the historian decided to add a new chapter that addressed the years of Menemism.
But it was not the last incorporation: “In 2012, I wrote about the Kirchner government, with some notion that this would end in 2010. I rounded off that chapter with the last four years of the Cristina Fernández government.
Now I understand it well from its end ”, he told Ñ three years ago, when the definitive edition of
Brief contemporary history of Argentina
(1916-2016)
arrived in bookstores
.
The cover with the sea storm had been left behind, but not the forcefulness of his ideas.
“My initial purpose in writing it was to get to the present,
to show the historicity of today.
So leaving him 20 years overdue contradicted the purpose of the book.
When I wrote the basis for the book, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the great problem of the country was democracy and all the upheavals that brought it back in 1983. From 2000, and especially the Kirchner cycle , my big question had to do with the State, its deterioration and its diminishing capacity to establish an institutional and administrative order over society ”, he elaborated in dialogue with Ñ.
Since then, he has not abandoned that method of "thinking that the present is the last frame of the film that comes from the past" nor the centrality that he offers to the idea of the State in his analyzes (both academic and his interventions in journalistic media ), although the years of Kirchnerism and the return of Peronism to the government in 2019 offer him new readings: "I confess that it took me a while to realize the enormous importance of the 'story' in Kirchnerism, perhaps because of disparaging its intellectual references," he acknowledged long time.
Has he ever said that the only leader he had is Raúl Alfonsín "and I intend to keep him," he added.
He also said that he admires Uruguayan society: "They did not have Peronism or Church," he said;
that a cherished memory is childhood summers in Pinamar and that his mother's ravioli have been his favorite dish.
The line started by his father has borne fruit and is not interrupted: although Luis Alberto Romero's son is dedicated to mathematics, his daughter Ana years ago began to build her own path in the discipline and today is a teacher and a graduate in History by the UBA.
Like him before, now she too is "the last frame of the film that comes from the past."
Pc
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