We are delighted to announce that Dr Cristina Blanco Sío-López, Senior Distinguished Researcher at the University of La Coruña and Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall from December 2024 to May 2025, received the ‘María Moliner’ Spanish National Research Award in the Humanities by the King of Spain, the Spanish Minister of Science, Innovation and Universities and the Secretary General for Research at the award ceremony held at the El Pardo Palace in Madrid on July 3, 2025.

The Jury responsible for conferring this award highlighted “her excellent scientific career in Contemporary History, as well as her career in the international arena and her renowned studies on the European integration process.”

The National Research Awards (PNI), launched in 1982 by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, recognise, each year, the career and contributions of those interdisciplinary Spanish scholars “carrying out outstanding work in scientific fields of international relevance and who contribute exceptionally to the advancement of science, to better knowledge of human beings and their coexistence, to the transfer of technology and the progress of Humanity”.

Cristina is Senior Distinguished Researcher at the University of La Coruña (UDC) in Spain and Principal Investigator (PI) of the tenure-granting NextGenerationEU project ‘FREEMOVEU’. In the Michaelmas term 2024 she was a Visiting Fellow at Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) of the University of Cambridge and in the Lent term 2025 she was a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge Digital Humanities (CDH) and at Clare Hall, where she worked on her new project, ‘Factors of Sustainable Peace: Art Informing Policy-making in European Integration’ Peace-scapes (1957-2004). Her main lines of research focus on the history of the European integration process, with an emphasis on factors of sustainable peace, human mobility rights and the instilment of time perceptions in political communication since 1989.

She is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (RHS), as well as a Full Member and Fellow of the Young Academy of Spain (AJdE) and the Young Academy of Europe (YAE). She was a Member of the Executive Committee of the Global Young Academy (GYA).

Dr Blanco Sío-López expresses how this award recognises both the social impact and the high value of the Humanities, so often overlooked: “It is also a reflection of the effort, dedication and enthusiasm of young consolidated researchers with the potential to create more exciting and inclusive realities in a changing world. It also implies an invitation to a more open dialogue between disciplines with which we can break arbitrary borders and design new spaces of socially engaged creative freedom”.