Denise Bentrovato (Italy) studied Language and Culture, African Studies, International Relations, and Conflict Resolution in The Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom. Since January 2008, she has been a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Utrecht (UU), for which, in November 2009, she received a two-year grant from the UU’s Research Institute for History and Culture. Currently, she is also enrolled in a MA programme in Citizenship and History Education at the Institute of Education, University of London.

Among other things, she worked as a community mediator and a peace educator in the UK, and was an assistant lecturer in peacekeeping and peacebuilding at the University of Utrecht.  She also worked at the European Centre for Conflict Prevention and at the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague, as well as at the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission and at the Institute of Research and Dialogue for Peace in Rwanda. In 2007, she received a fellowship from the Georg Eckert Institut, where, as part of the Textbooks and Conflict unit, she was involved in the concept development and in the organisation of the 2008 International Summer School on ‘The Janus-face of Education in Conflict’.

Current research project

Meant to be a follow-up to her previous MA research on ‘The role of education systems in violent conflict: towards a model of conflict analysis for the education sector’, her current Ph.D. research project on ‘Educational reform in the aftermath of war and mass violence: teaching and learning a sensitive and controversial history in the Great Lakes Region of Africa’ sets to explore the issue of post-war educational reconstruction and reform, with a focus on the challenges and promises of history education and its reform in the aftermath of war and mass violence in Central Africa. At the core of this study is a comparative analysis of Rwanda’s, Burundi’s and Congo’s current history curricula and textbooks, as well as an analysis of extensive surveys conducted with both students and teachers living in the region.