A paper by Virta, Puurtinen and Pihlainen, published in Finnish in the journal of the Finnish Historical Society in 2016 and about multidisciplinary expertise in history, is now available online. Please see the English abstract below.
Thousands of experts work in the field of history, yet there is no comprehensive view available of what history expertise might be. In this article, we tackle this question of historians’ expertise from the point of view of expertise research, theory of history and history didactics, suggesting that definitions of expertise in history and the development of history higher education can benefit from an approach spanning these different disciplines. Our attention is directed particularly at the specific characteristics of historical thinking and at what it is historians do. It is here that the aspects of history expertise that we feel demand increased attention in higher education are crystallized. We take expert historians to be someone who actively develops themselves in their thinking, actions and capacity to reflect on their profession. Their professional skills include the ability to pose questions central to their field of research, a well-structured knowledge-base, and the source-critical proficiency typical of an academic historian. Expertise in history is a complex issue, and one that necessarily needs to be examined in its specific sociocultural context.