This article reflects on key concepts of historical thinking proposed by doctoral students and young researchers. Established concepts such as the social role of history, professional historian and (imagined) space are still important to the new generation of historians. At the same time, some new concepts are emerging, such as political exhumations, mass graves, motion, embodied historical research, ahistorical memory politics, websites as historical sources, critical heritage studies and heritagisation, treason, preposterous history – an idea taken from Mieke Bal, and “Supreme Peace” – a notion drawn from the Chinese philosophy of history. To interpret these concepts, I build word clouds as a way of creating knowledge involving non‑human factors (algorithms) while enabling speculative interpretations of the relations between words. The idea of a secure past comes to the fore and I therefore examine whether historical security and being secure in history could be considered important elements of interdisciplinary security studies.

In this interview, conducted during the XXIII International Congress of Historical Sciences in Poznań (2022), Olufunke Adeboye (Professor of Social History at the University of Lagos, Nigeria) discusses the problems of decolonisation of African history, the relations between academic historiography and popular history, new trends in historical writing, the importance of theory for historical research, and the problems of historical education in Nigeria.