At a celebration

We spent Friday at a conference honouring Rainer Bauböck, an old friend and colleague who is leaving the European University Institute after 10 years of service there. He's not "retiring" as such, but moving on to a portfolio of other academic activities, including some short term visitorships and some teaching here and there. He'll also continue part time at the EUI, and he has quite a few PhD students who have yet to complete their theses.


It was a lovely and heartwarming event, extremely well organised mostly by a group of the current supervisees who are seen here presenting to Rainer a book of memories and pictures, collated by Rainer's wife Sylvia, who was completely in on the 'secret'. Perhaps the funniest thing of the day was that Sam (here with the microphone) and Sylvia were having coffee in San Domenico one day discussing the conference and the various events, when Rainer came past and wondered what on earth one of his supervisees and his wife were doing having coffee together and looking a bit furtive about it. That story brought the house down.


The event comprised some fairly serious academic activities, including a book panel, some research presentations and a panel about the Global CIT project which links me to Rainer. I had great fun documenting the event on the Global CIT twitter account, and this was my favourite tweet, about a 'mock viva' conducted by the students and others, on a thesis on the subject of "Citizen Bauböck" which celebrated what an extraordinary colleague and mentor Rainer is to all of us.



It was one of those events where I felt really at home in my "academic tribe", meeting old friends and making a few new ones. Quite a few partners and spouses were in evidence, and Mr A came along too.