The first step was taken: on April 26 and 27 the partners of the DETECt Consortium gathered in Bologna, Italy, for the project’s kick off meeting. The event took place at one of the finest halls of the University, the DAMSLab of the Department of the Arts. Funded in the frame of the highly competitive Horizon 2020 European Research Programme, DETECt—Detecting Transcultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives—will carry on collaborative research on the extremely rich contemporary European production in the field of the crime media genre (including literature, film and television) for the next 40 months.

The Consortium brings together 18 partners from all around the continent. In addition to 13 academic partners (Università di Bologna, Italy; Aalborg University, Denmark; Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium; The Queen’s University of Belfast, United Kingdom; University of Limoges, France; Link Campus University, Italy; Universitatea din Bucarest, Romania; University of Debrecen, Hungary; University of Ioannina, Greece; Aarhus Universitet, Denmark; Université Paris Ouest, France; Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany; Umea University, Sweden)—the Consortium also includes 3 industrial partners (TV2, Denmark; Miso Film, Denmark; VisitAarhus, Denmark) and 2 cultural organizations (Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie Berlin, Germany; Bibliocité-Bibliothèque des Littératures Policiers, France).

 All together the partners will work to produce innovative learning materials, policy documents and public engagement initiatives aimed to increase awareness about the role of popular media culture in the generation of a shared European identity.

DETECt coordinator Professor Monica Dall’Asta and Professor Ilaria Bartolini (project technological coordinator) welcomed the partners and provided an overview of the agenda and the meeting’s main objectives. The discussion focused around the criteria to follow for the selection of the project’s corpus of case studies and the identification of DETECt five main research areas, which include: representation studies (with focus on three areas: European history, gender and ethnicity, and the phenomenology of crime as portrayed in the European contemporary crime productions), production studies, distribution and reception studies, location studies, and digital pedagogy. Particular attention was paid to the creation of the project’s digital outputs, such as the DETECt Atlas, App and Massive Online Open Course that will be launched in the next future.

Work package leaders offered presentations of the main objectives and challenges related to their specific research areas. All partners participated most actively in the discussion, contributing useful suggestions about how to organize the work.