Editorial Board

Meet our Editorial Board for 2023, all the people who are standing behind our famous Carnival:

Charlotte Rottiers, Editor-in-Chief

Charlotte Rottiers is working as a PhD researcher at the KU Leuven’s Faculty of Architecture in Ghent since 2020. She is trained in both Art History (MA, 2018), East European Languages and Cultures (BA, 2021) and Urbanism and Spatial Planning (MA, 2022). Her interests lie in architectural history, cultural and political representation combined with the formation of identity through art and architecture. Her current PhD research investigates the role attributed to architecture and interior decoration in the deployment of the Belgian diplomatic network from the moment of its foundation until the outbreak of the second world war. She previously was active as treasurer of ISHA Ghent, and one of the main organisors of the 31st Annual Conference in Ghent (September 2020) and New Year’s Seminar in Vienna (February 2023). This year she will be Vice President at ISHA International, as well as take up her third term as Editor-in-Chief. She is very much looking forward to continuing the collaboration with the motivated Editorial Board, who really are the working force behind Carnival and provide such valuable feedback and experiences to our members who want to publish their research.

Julia Boechat Machado

Julia is currently working on her PhD in Comparative History at Central European University, Vienna. She has previously studied in Brazil, her home country, (History BA in UFMG, 2018), Bologna, Italy (Global Cultures MA in UNIBO, 2020), and Belarus (intensive Russian language courses, 2021). She is interested in cultural history, especially in what concerns the former Soviet Union. She is also passionate about literature, and is currently attempting to read a book from every country in the world. She joined ISHA in 2020, during the New Year’s Seminar in Zagreb, and was one of the organizers of the 2023 conference in Vienna, during which she was also elected as Webmaster and council member. She has been serving as a member of Carnival’s Editorial Board since 2022, and hopes to help students who want to publish their research and Carnival to get to new audiences.

Bertalan Bordas

Bertalan Bordás is a PhD candidate from the University of Pécs, Hungary. He has done his degrees of History BA and MA at the former institution and obtained a degree in International Relations MA at the Budapest Corvinus University. His main research interests cover the topics of international history, foreign policy decision-making in the 19th and 20th centuries, and media history. He is a frequent visitor of the Kew National Archives in London, and a former Erasmus student of University College London. He started his PhD in 2018 and looking to defend his thesis with the (working) title: Foreign policy and diplomatic relations of Great Britain and the Austro–Hungarian Monarchy in the ministry of Count Gyula Andrássy the senior (1871–1879). He joined ISHA and the Editorial Board in 2022.

Zorana Cvijanović

Zorana is a MA student at the Central European University’s Department of Medieval Studies in Vienna. Prior to her current studies, she obtained her BA and MA degrees in classical philology at the University of Belgrade. She is primarily interested in classical heritage and the concept of “virtuous pagans” in medieval Latin literature. Her previous Master’s thesis was about the Christian legend of the emperor Trajan in the early vita of Gregory the Great. Currently, she is focusing on the 12th-century Latin reinterpretations of the Trojan War, where Hector of Troy was portrayed as a model of virtue for crusading knights and monarchs.

david kraus

David has served as an official in diverse positions over the last years, and is now part of the Editorial Board, and of the treasury supervision. He has been an ISHA member since 2015: first in Heidelberg and since 2019 in Marburg, where he now started a PhD.

Jeroen Petit

Jeroen is a historical linguistics and literature student at Ghent University, Belgium. In 2020 he obtained his master’s degree in history at the same university. Since 2018 he has been a member of the Institute for Early Modern History (IEMH) a research alliance linking historians of the Early Modern period primarily from Ghent University and the Free University of Brussels. His research focuses on post-conflict diplomatic negotiations in 17th century Virginia between English settlers and Native Americans and Chambers of Rhetoric in the 16th century. In addition to his studies, he is a volunteer with the Flemish Red Cross and an avid beekeeper. After joining the Editorial Board in 2021, he will this year step up as Editor-in-Chief and join forces with Charlotte to realise a themed issue dedicated to diplomatic history.

Zora Piskačová

Zora is a PhD Candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the United States. Originally from Prague, Czech Republic, she has earned her B.A. in History at the Franklin University in Lugano, Switzerland and her M.A. in East European Studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany. She studies modern East Central European history with particular emphasis on the urban experience in the borderlands. Her dissertation is a transnational urban history of the divided city of Teschen in the interwar period and centers on responses of municipal administrators to border-induced challenges. She joined ISHA for the first time in January 2016 for a New Year’s Seminar in Marburg. Having founded ISHA Lugano, she actively participated in ISHA seminars until her move to the United States in 2019. She’s excited to rejoin the ISHA family as a member of Carnival’s Editorial Board and indulge her—often misunderstood—passion for editing and citations.

Barbara testini

Barbara Testini is a PhD student in Historical Studies at the conjoint doctoral programme of the universities of Florence and Siena. She holds a MA in History and Global Cultures at the University of Bologna, and previously obtained a bachelor’s degree in European Languages and Literatures at the University of Milan. Her Master’s thesis was about the cultural and historical memory of colonialism in Italian society through the discourse analysis of History textbooks for Italian high schools with respect to the topic of colonialism. She is currently focusing on the representation of Africa in the Italian press based on the personal archive by late historian of colonialism Angelo Del Boca, who collected cuttings from the main Italian newspapers concerning the topic of Afro-Italian relations. She attended her first ISHA conference in Gent in September 2020, and has been a member of Carnival’s Editorial Board since 2022.

Victor Wagner

Victor joined CARNIVAL´s editorial board in early 2023. He has a BA in communication studies and in 2022 obtained a joint MA degree in European History from HU Berlin and UC Dublin. His research usually addresses questions of diplomacy, nationalism, European integration, communication or media systems. His MA thesis discussed the dynamics and power struggles during unofficial truces in World War I. 

He has been a member of ISHA since 2017 and acted as PR Official of the Berlin section from 2017 to 2020. During that time he also participated in several of ISHA’s international seminars, covering a wide range of fascinating topics and getting to know fellow students and researchers from aroung the globe. By joining the editorial team at CARNIVAL, he wants to give something back to this marvellous community and all other students of history and related fields who want to publish their research projects and papers.