Thinking through Practice: Lecture at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

On 19 February 2026, Valentina Rossi, Director of the Gaudium Magnum Foundation, delivered a lecture at Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. Titled “Research and Cultural Institutions: Iberian Studies Between Academic Knowledge and Public Forms – The Case of the Gaudium Magnum Foundation” it examined how academic research is reshaped as it enters institutional and public-facing contexts.

Drawing on the Foundation’s work, she outlined the structural tensions that emerge in this transition. These include the pressure between speed and duration, the need to balance intellectual rigour with public legibility, and the challenge of aligning academic accountability with institutional expectations. Research, Valentina Rossi argued, cannot simply circulate; it has to be reframed, scheduled, and often fragmented within systems that shape both its form and its continuity over time.

The lecture was structured around three case studies based on projects developed by the Foundation. The Camões project, organised around the poet’s 500th anniversary, demonstrated how clearly defined institutional roles can enable rigorous scholarship to reach broader audiences while maintaining its intellectual coherence. A second, ongoing project centred on the Monastery of Batalha highlighted the challenges that arise when institutional responsibilities are dispersed and public-facing formats remain unresolved. A third case, focused on the art historian Robert Smith, pointed to the importance of long-term institutional frameworks over single-event outputs in sustaining research over time.

Across these examples, Valentina Rossi suggested that the successful translation of research beyond academia depends less on its intellectual quality than on how responsibility, time, and institutional alignment are managed. At the same time, the lecture underscored the active role of foundations and cultural institutions as intermediaries—shaping how research is framed, supported, and made public, while navigating constraints related to funding, temporality, and visibility. Rather than offering prescriptive solutions, the lecture advanced a diagnostic perspective, inviting researchers to engage more consciously with the conditions that increasingly shape the visibility and durability of their work.

Thinking through Practice

Thinking through Practice is a new project through which the Foundation begins to reflect on its institutional experience as an explicit field of inquiry.

Rooted in the Foundation’s own work, the project is based on the idea that practice is not simply the execution of a mission, but also a site in which questions, methods, and positions take shape. Exhibitions, publications, partnerships, and long-term programmes do not only produce outcomes; they also generate ways of understanding how research is organised, sustained, and made public.

Through a series of academic lectures and future editorial developments, Thinking through Practice will gradually give form to this emerging body of thought. Its purpose is not merely to describe the Foundation’s activity, but to derive from it a more structured reflection on the relationship between research, institutions, continuity, and public form.