Biography
Alexander Maxwell studied in Davis, Göttingen, Brno, Bloomington, and Budapest before completing a Ph.D. in history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He held short-term positions in Erfurt, Swansea, Reno, and Bucharest before settling in New Zealand. He is now associate professor of history at Victoria University of Wellington. He is the author of Choosing Slovakia, Patriots Against Fashion, and Everyday Nationalism in Hungary. He has guest edited themed issues of Nationalities Papers, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, German Studies Review, the New Zealand Slavonic Journal, and the Journal of Nationalism, Memory, and Language Politics. He is currently researching Habsburg Panslavism and the language/dialect dichotomy.
Visiting fellowship April 2023
Motivation
I have professional and personal motives for coming to Ljubljana. Professionally, I want to expand my knowledge of Habsburg Slavic life to Carinthia, Carnoiola and the Littoral: many important figures in Habsburg Slavism, such as Kopitar and Miklošič, come from the land that would eventually become Slovene, and I want to integrate those famous figures into my personal understanding of Habsburg Slavic history. At a personal level, I have always enjoyed my visits to Ljubljana, and often thought it would be nice to spend a year here. So this is the year!
List of publications
Everyday Nationalism in Hungary, 1789-1867 (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2019), 258 pages. ISBN-10: 3110634112; DOI: 10.1515/9783110638448
Patriots Against Fashion: Clothing and Nationalism in Europe’s Age of Revolutions (London: Palgrave, 2014), 311 pages. ISBN-10: 1137277130; DOI: 10.1057/9781137277145
Choosing Slovakia: Slavic Hungary, the Czech Language and Accidental Nationalism (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 288 pages. ISBN-10: 1848850743
Reciprocity Between the Tribes and Dialects of the Slavic Language, a translation of Ján Kollár’s Wechselseitigkeit (Bloomington: Slavica Press, 2009), including “Ján Kollár’s Linguistic Nationalism,” 1-68; “A note on the translation” 1-67, “A note on the Translation,” 69-72. ISBN-10: 0893573434
Edited Volumes
Pan-Nationalisms in Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2023). ISBN-10:1032485701
The Comparative Approach to National Movements: Miroslav Hroch and Nationalism Studies (London: Routledge, 2012). ISBN-10: 0415681960
The East-West Discourse: Symbolic Geography and its Consequences (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011). ISBN-10: 3034301987
Journal Articles
“Objective Facts, Consensus Opinions and the Study of Slovak Panslavism,” Historický časopis, vol. 71, no. 4 (2023), 723-747. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31577/histcaso.2023.71.4.9
“Suppressing the Memory of Slovak Panslavism: The historiographical Misrepresentation of Kollár and Štúr,” Historický časopis, vol. 71, no. 2 (2023), 249-277. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31577/histcaso.2023.71.2.3
“The Dialects of Panslavic, Serbocroatian, and Croatian: Linguistic Taxonomies in Zagreb, 1836–1997,” Journal of Nationalism, Memory and Language Politics, vol. 17 no. 1 (2023), 20-52. DOI: 10.2478/jnmlp-2023-0001
With Raf Van Rooy: “Early Modern Terminology for Dialect: Denigration, Purism, and the Language-Dialect Dichotomy,” Contributions to the History of Concepts, vol. 18, no. 1 (2023), 95-118. DOI: 10.3167/choc.2023.180105
“Popular and Scholarly Primordialism: The Politics of Ukrainian History during Russia’s 2022 Invasion of Ukraine.” Journal of Nationalism, Memory and Language Politics, vol. 16, no. 2 (2022), 152-171. DOI: 10.2478/jnmlp-2022-0008
“Noam Chomsky and the Language/Dialect Dichotomy,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, vol. 32, no. 1 (2022), 72-98. ISSN: 0939-2815
“Greece and Germany as Models for Habsburg Pan-Slavs,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, vol. 28, no. 1 (2021), 20-39. DOI: 10.1080/13537113.2021.2004762
With Jan Záhořík and Molly Turner: “The Nation versus the ‘Not-Quite-Nation’: A Semantic Approach to Nationalism and Its Terminology,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, vol. 21, no. 2 (2021), 194-207. DOI: 10.1111/sena.12349
“‘What is my purpose?’ Artificial Sentience Having an Existential Crisis in Rick and Morty,” Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy, vol. 4 (2021), 1-14. DOI: 10.26686/wgtn.14721459
“Analyzing Nationalized Clothing: Nationalism Theory meets Fashion Studies,” National Identities, vol. 21, no. 1 (2021), 1-14. DOI: 10.1080/14608944.2019.1634037; ISSN: 1460-8944
“Contingency and ‘National Awakening’,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, vol. 26, no. 2 (2020), 183-201. DOI: 10.1080/13537113.2020.1754554; ISSN: 1353-7113
“Glottonyms, Anachronism and Ambiguity in Scholarly Depictions of Juraj Križanić/Юрий Крижанич,” Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 98, no. 2, (2020), 201-234. DOI: 10.5699/slaveasteurorev2.98.2.0201; ISSN: 0037-6795
“Primordialism for Scholars Who Ought to Know Better: Anthony D. Smith’s Critique of Modernization Theory,” Nationalities Papers, vol. 48, no. 1 (2020), 826-842. DOI: 10.1017/nps.2019.93; ISSN: 0090-5992
With Molly Turner: “Nationalists Rejecting Statehood: Three Case Studies from Wales, Catalonia, and Slovakia.” Nations and Nationalism, vol. 26, no. 2 (2020), 692-707. DOI: 10.1111/nana.12577
With Jan Feld: “Sampling Error in Lexicostatistical Measurements: A Slavic Case Study,” Diachronica, vol. 36, no. 1 (2019), 100-120. DOI: 10.1075/dia.18004.fel; ISSN: 0176-4225
“When Theory is a Joke: The Weinrich Witticism in Linguistics,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, vol. 28, no. 2 (2018), 263-292. ISSN: 0939-2815
Supplemental material published with Robert Alexander Hurley and Timothy Atkin: “The Weinreich Witticism Database.” Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, vol. 28, no. 2 (2018), electronic resource, URL: .
“‘Supplicant Nationalism’ in Slovakia and Wales: Polyethnic Rights During the Nineteenth Century.” Central Europe, vol. 16, no. 1 (2018), 29-50. DOI: 10.1080/14790963.2018.1492684; ISSN: 1479-0963
“Effacing Panslavism: Linguistic Classification and Historiographic Misrepresentation,” Nationalities Papers, vol. 46, no. 4 (2018), 633-53. DOI: 10.1080/00905992.2017.1374360; ISSN: 0090-5992
With Geoffrey Brown: “Czechoslovak Ruthenia’s 1925 Latinization Campaign as the Heritage of Nineteenth-Century Slavism,” Nationalities Papers, vol. 44, no. 6 (2016), 950-966. DOI: 10.1080/00905992.2016.1212824
“Hungaro-German Dual Nationality: Germans, Slavs and Magyars during the 1848 Revolution,” German Studies Review, vol. 39, no. 1 (2016), 17-39. DOI: 10.1353/gsr.2016.0022
With Tim Smith: “Positing “Not-yet-Nationalism”: Limits to the Impact of Nationalism Theory on Kurdish Historiography,” Nationalities Papers, vol. 44, no. 5 (2015), 771-787. DOI: 10.1080/00905992.2015.1049135
“Taxonomies of the Slavic World since the Enlightenment: Schematizing Perceptions of Slavic Ethnonyms in a Chart,” Language and History, vol. 58, no. 1 (2015), 24-54. DOI: 10.1179/1759753615Z.00000000037
“The Nation as a Gentleman’s Agreement: Masculinity and Nationality in Nineteenth-Century Hungary,” Men and Masculinities, vol. 18, no. 5 (2015), 536-558. DOI: 10.1177/1097184X15575156
“ ‘The Handsome Man with Hungarian Moustache and Beard’: National Moustaches in Habsburg Hungary,” Journal of Cultural and Social History, vol. 12, no. 1 (2015), 51-76. DOI: 10.2752/147800415X14135484867144
“Edvard Beneš and the Soft Sell: Czechoslovak Diplomacy toward Lusatia, 1918-1919,” Bohemia, vol. 54, no. 2 (2014), 348-367. DOI:10.18447/BoZ-2014-3945
“National Alcohol in Hungary’s Reform Era: Wine, Spirits, and the Patriotic Imagination,” Central Europe, vol. 12, no. 2 (2014), 117-35. DOI: 10.1179/1479096314Z.00000000027
“The 1848 Revolution and the Limits of Sorbian Czechoslovakism,” The New Zealand Slavonic Journal, vol. 46 (2012 [published in 2014]), 9-22. JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24429431
“Tobacco as Cultural Signifier: A Cultural History of Masculinity and Nationality in Habsburg Hungary,” Hungarian Cultural Studies, vol. 5 (2012), 45-64. DOI: 10.5195/ahea.2012.68
“Herder, Kollár, and the Origins of Slavic Ethnography,” Traditiones: Journal of the Institute of Slovenian Ethnology, vol. 40, no. 2 (2011), 79-95. DOI: 10.3986/Traditio2011/400205; ISSN: 0352-0447
“Typologies and Phase Theories in Nationalism Studies: Hroch’s A-B-C Schema as a Basis for Comparative Terminology,” Nationalities Papers, vol. 38, no. 6 (2010), 865–880; also reprinted in: Alexander Maxwell, ed., The Comparative Approach to National Movements: Miroslav Hroch and Nationalism Studies (London: Routledge, 2012), 79-96. DOI: 10.1080/00905992.2010.515970
“Slavic Macedonian Nationalism: From ‘Regional’ to ‘Ethnic’,” Ethnologia Balkanica, vol. 11 (2008), 127-54.
“National Endogamy and Double Standards: Sexuality and Nationalism in East-Central Europe during the 19th Century,” Journal of Social History, vol. 41, no. 2 (2007), 413-33. DOI: 10.1353/jsh/41.2.413
“Why the Slovak Language has Three Dialects: A Case Study in Historical Perceptual Dialectology,” Austrian History Yearbook, vol. 37 (2006), 385-414. DOI: 10.1017/s0067237800016817.
“Multiple Nationalism: National Concepts in 19th century Hungary and Benedict Anderson’s ‘Imagined Communities’,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, vol. 11, no. 3 (2005), 385-414. DOI: 10.1080/13537110500255619
“Nationalizing Sexuality: Sexual Stereotypes in the Habsburg Empire,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 14, no. 3 (2005), 266-90. DOI: 10.1353/sex.2006.0026
“Magyarization, Language Planning, and Whorf – The Word ‘Uhor’ as a Case Study in Linguistic Relativism,” Multilingua, vol. 23, no. 4 (2004), 319-337. DOI: 10.1515/mult.2004.23.4.319
Introductions to themed issues
“Rebels into Loyalists, or Loyalists into Rebels? Habsburg Officials and Their International Contacts during the Age of Revolutions,” Central Europe, vol. 21, no. 1 (2023), 1-7. DOI: 10.1080/14790963.2023.2181496
“The 2022 Invasion of Ukraine and its Lessons for Nationalism Studies,” Journal of Nationalism, Memory and Language Politics, vol. 16, no. 2 (2022), 94-103. DOI: 10.2478/jnmlp-2022-0012
“Pan-Nationalism as a Category in Theory and Practice,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, vol. 28, no. 1 (2021), 1-19. DOI: 10.1080/13537113.2021.2004767
“Nationalism as Classification: Suggestions for Reformulating Nationalism Research,” Nationalities Papers, vol. 46, no. 4 (2018), 539-555. DOI: 10.1080/00905992.2018.1448376; ISSN: 0090-5992
With Sacha Davis: “Germanness beyond Germany: Collective Identity in German Diaspora Communities,” German Studies Review, vol. 39, no. 1 (2016), 1-15. DOI: 10.1353/gsr.2016.0016
“Twenty-five years of A-B-C: Miroslav Hroch’s Impact on Nationalism Studies,” Nationalities Papers, vol. 38, no. 6 (November 2010), 773-76. DOI: 10.1080/00905992.2010.515975
Biography
My name is Ana Yara Postigo Fuentes, and I am currently working on my postdoctoral project at Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf.
In my doctoral thesis, my research focused on the role of video games and, specifically, esports as a platform for intercultural and multilingual encounters, where the various elements within the game either facilitate or hinder the learning process. Using a qualitative approach and discourse analysis, I developed a comprehensive theory that categorizes video games into distinct narrative types, asserting that learning occurs through the player's active engagement with these narratives. This approach allowed me to explore the intricate dynamics of language, culture, and learning within the gaming context, shedding new light on the potential of esports as educational contexts and as a complex system of narratives.
My passion for narratives has led me to the EU Horizon ARENAS Project (Analysis of and Responses to Extremist Narratives), where I currently collaborate as a coordinator alongside Dr. Rolf Kailuweit from the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. Our project aims to detect and define criteria for extremist narratives, examining operational definitions, identifying patterns of extreme speech, and connecting them to the broader narrative landscape. Within this collaborative project, I have the privilege of working closely with the INZ members Kristina Pahor de Maiti, Dr. Darja Fišer, and Dr. Jure Gašparič.
Visiting fellowship February 2024
Motivation
My main aim of coming to INZ is to strengthen the cooperative process inside the ARENAS project between the three INZ members mentioned and myself, to facilitate knowledge transfer between our different areas of expertise (education sciences, history, linguistics) and to find concrete opportunities for future cooperation thorugh common project applications. My stay will take place in February and March 2024. By that time, the preliminary data collection for the ARENAS project will have been completed, and a comprehensive literature review will be in place. This will enable us to focus on identifying patterns and specific forms of appearance in extremist narratives.
The preliminary working plan for my visit would include working on a comprehensive definition of extremist narratives which will be constructed based on literature review, evaluation of definitions received from NGOs, as well as insights from the first round of data analysis. This analysis will be based on corpus linguistc methodology which I hope to learn during my stay at INZ. The interpretation of the results, on the other hand, will be approached from narratology which is the expertise I can bring to INZ and which can be useful to the team and other INZ members, especially those working in conceptual history. By comparing the results from Slovene, German and possibly Spanish data, our collaborative efforts aim to achieve the ultimate goal of producing a joint publication.
Selected publications
• Castañeda, L., Viñoles-Cosentino, V., Postigo-Fuentes, A.Y., Herrero, C. and Cachia, R., Strategic Approaches to Regional Transformation of Digital Education, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2023, doi:10.2760/13248, JRC134282
• Esteve-Mon, F.; Postigo-Fuentes, A.Y. & Castañeda, L. (2022) A strategic approach of the crucial elements for the implementation of digital tools and processes in Higher Education. Higher Education Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1111/hequ.12411
• Fernández Navas, M., Alcaraz Salarirche, N., Pérez Granados, L., & Postigo-Fuentes, A. Y. (2020). Is Qualitative Research in Education Being Lost in Spain? Analysis and Reflections on the Problems Arising from Generating Knowledge Hegemonically. The Qualitative Report, 25(6)
• Postigo-Fuentes, A. Y., & Fernández Navas, M. (2020). The process of learning a second language in esports. Círculo de lingüística aplicada a la comunicación.
• Postigo-Fuentes, A. Y., & Fernández Navas, M. (2020). Factors Influencing Foreign Language Learning in eSports. A Case Study. Qualitative Research in Education, 9(2), 128-159. http://dx.doi.org/10.17583/qre.2020.4997
Biography
I am an architectural historian with an interdisciplinary background. I have a PhD in architecture from TU Wien. I have worked as a lecturer at TU Wien, Department of Housing and Design, and as a project coordinator at the Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Research (IOER) in Dresden. I am currently the Principal Investigator of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) funded research project "Transnational School Construction" at the Department of Design History and Theory, University of Applied Arts Vienna. I am a coordinator of the working group "Residential Buildings and Architectural Design" within the European Network for Housing Research (ENHR). My research interests lie at the intersection of the history and co-production of the built environment and material cultures. My recent studies have focused on international organizations and post-war school-building programs.
Visiting fellowship February 2024
Motivation
My motivation for applying for the fellowship is my interest in exploring mobilities and exchanges in the history of education and architecture, and in assessing the impact of international organizations on national educational reforms and school construction. My research stay at the Institute of Contemporary History will allow me to further examine the archival documents I have already obtained and to supplement these materials with primary and secondary sources from the INZ. The focus will be on the influence of the OECD in the later stages of Yugoslav school reform.
Due to my extensive experience in grant writing, I am interested in joint applications for international funding for research on the history of education, internationalism, and material culture. I am also interested in co-organizing conferences either in Vienna or Ljubljana and applying for event funding.
Selected Recent Publications
Lorbek, Maja. The Hallenschule. Decoding Transnational Standards in the Austrian Setting’. In Geometrien des Lebens: Materialien zu Viktor Hufnagl (1922–2007), edited by Elise Feiersinger, Gabriele Kaiser, Gabriele Ruff, and Österreichische Gesellschaft für Architektur, 19–26. Zürich: Park Books, 2022.
Lorbek, Maja. Schulen weiterbauen. Strategische Entwicklung von Schulgebäudebeständen. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2020.
Lorbek, Maja. School Renovation Programme in Vienna Exploring the Actions of Relevant Social Groups and the Potential for Interpretative Flexibility’. In Vom Wert des Weiterbauens, edited by Eva Maria Froschauer, Werner Lorenz, Luise Rellensmann, and Albrecht Wiesener, 165–76. De Gruyter, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783035622249-012.
Lorbek, Maja. Idealizations of the Kleinhaus: On the Typology of the Small Single-Family House in Germany, 1920s–1960s. Architectural Histories 6, no. 1 (25 October 2018) https://doi.org/10.5334/ah.243
Biography
I am a doctoral candidate at Central European University and a researcher on the project Philosophy in Late Socialist Europe: Theoretical Practices in the Face of Polycrisis at the Babeș-Bolyai University. My doctoral research focuses on the intellectual history of Marxist Humanism in socialist Yugoslavia. The aim of my research is to reconstruct this dense stream of philosophical and political thought with a view to its regional and international embeddedness. I am broadly interested in the social, cultural, feminist, and art histories of East Central Europe, and the history of modern philosophy. In addition, I am interested in various theoretical and methodological approaches to history, and the challenges of writing transnational, comparative, and global histories.
Before coming to INZ, I was a researcher on an Erasmus Internship Mobility Grant at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences (Institute of Culture and Memory Studies) in Ljubljana. During 2021–2022, I was at Cornell University (Ithaca, New York) as the Sidgwick-Miller CEU Scholar at the Cornell Branch of Telluride Association. Last year, I was a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, IWM) in Vienna, on a SEE Graduate Scholarships program. From September to December 2023, I was a guest at Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin.
Between January 2021 and September 2023, I participated in the project with Prof. Trencsényi, Dr. Isidora Grubački, and Lucija Balikić, Mapping Crisis- Discourses in East Central Europe 1918–2008. The project combined methodology of conceptual history with a contextualist history of political thought and with a transnational perspective. Our volume A Never-Ending Story? East Central European Crisis Discourses in the Twentieth Century, is to be published shortly with the Routledge.
Visiting Fellowship in January 2024
Motivation
At the Institute I will work on the project on Socialist Alliance of Working People, where I will focus on the position and role of critical intellectuals in this organization. I will have an opportunity to visit the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia as well as the National and University Library.
Publications
Blagojević, Una. “Zagorka Golubović: premoščala je utopijo in realnost.” Jovana Mihajlović Trbovc (ed.) Naše znanstvenice: Kako so ženske soustvarjale znanost v Jugoslaviji, ZRC SAZU, 2023.
Blagojević, Una. “L'histoire intellectuelle globale et les marxistes humanistes yougoslaves.” Forum "La Yougoslavie socialiste et le monde, la Yougoslavie socialiste dans le monde" edited by Agustín Cosovschi. Balkanologie: Revue d'études pluridisciplinaires, 2022.
Blagojević, Una. “Phenomenology and existentialism in dialogue with Marxist humanism in Yugoslavia in the 1950s and 1960s.” Studies in East European Thought, 2022
Blagojević, Una. “The Journal Praxis and Women Intellectuals.” Contradictions: A Journal for Critical Thought Vol. 4, No.2 (2020): 47–69.
Blagojević, Una. “Worlds of Praxis: 1968, intellectuals, and an island in the Yugoslav Adriatic.” Unsettled 1968 in the Troubled Present: Revisiting the 50 Years of Discussions from East and Central Europe, edited by Aleksandra Konarzewska, Anna Nakai and Michał Przeperski. Routledge: London, New York, 2019.
Blagojević, Una. “The International Philosophical Problem of Self-Managing Socialism: The Case of Praxis.” Acta Histriae Vol. 27, No.1 (2019): 89–106.
Biography
I am a Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the Georgian American University in Tbilisi and a Political Analyst at the Georgian Public Broadcaster/First Channel. I have been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik, at the Masaryk University in Brno and at the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid. My research and teaching interests include qualitative research, critical sociology, Marxist thought in ‘Actually existing Socialism’, post-socialist politics and society, Soviet Union (life and social order), ruling class, problems of democracy, social & political theory, political sociology, state, power and ideology, nationalism, and politics of memory in Europe.
Visiting Fellowship in January 2024
Motivation
This is my pleasure to join the Institute for Contemporary History as a Visiting Fellow.
Currently, I conduct individual research aiming to investigate the traditions of Marxist social and political thinking in Soviet Georgia, with particular focus on post-war authors and texts. The objective of my research is to collect relevant sources and to prepare a reader on Soviet Georgian Marxist Thought. The reader will expose specific chapters from the books and other types of texts authored by Soviet Georgian Marxist scholars. Today, these authors are ‘forgotten pantheon’ of Marxist community. Their intellectual legacy is neglected by the dominant post-soviet liberal capitalist order. Therefore, my goal is to promote their intellectual life and legacy.
My interest to Marxist political thought is not limited with Soviet Georgian experience, but I am also interested in other geographical and cultural zones of ‘actually existing socialism’. East Central Europe is among them. The aim of my visiting fellowship in Slovenia is to comprehend with post-war Marxist thought in East Central Europe and with major intellectual topics and polemics popular among the Marxist circles in post-war East Central Europe. I am especially interested to compare Soviet Georgian and Slovenian Marxist thought. Such comparison is interesting and thought provoking as both states represented small states of big unity.
My fellowship at the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana includes conducting the secondary research at the institute’s library, conversations with the researchers specialized in history of political thought in East Central Europe and a guest lecture on Soviet Georgian Marxist political thought.
Additionally, another purpose of my visiting fellowship is to establish and foster academic and intellectual collaboration between Georgian and Slovenian scholars.
Publications (a selection)
Bakar Berekashvili & Veronika Pfeilschifter, Contemporary left in Georgia: A Conversation with Bakar Berekashvili. New Eastern Europe, Issue 5/2022, pp. 119-125
Bakar Berekashvili, Ideological Dialectics of Post-Soviet Nationalism. Copernicus Journal of Political Studies, No. 2/2021, pp. 73-90
Bakar Berekashvili, After the Soviet Union: a melancholy of unwanted experiences. New Eastern Europe, Issue 6/2021, pp. 159-164
Bakar Berekashvili, Introduction: Train Lullaby. In: Bakar Berekashvili (Scientific Editor), Life by the Railroad: Memory and Contemporaneity of Chiatura and Zestaponi. Tbilisi: Forum for Intercultural Dialogue, 2021, pp. 9-26 (Available in Georgian Language).
Bakar Berekashvili, Notes of a Post-Soviet Researcher. In: Bakar Berekashvili (Scientific Editor), Chiatura and Tkibuli: An Attempt for Critical Understanding. Tbilisi: Forum for Intercultural Dialogue, 2020, pp. 9-33 (Available in Georgian language).
Bakar Berekashvili, Democracy and Liberalism: Crisis, Pathologies and Resistance. Copernicus Journal of Political Studies, No. 2/2018, pp. 29-59
Bakar Berekashvili, Nationalism and Hegemony in Post-Communist Georgia. Caucasus Edition – Journal of Conflict Transformation, Volume 3, Issue 2, 2018, pp. 67-79
Bakar Berekashvili, Georgia’s liberal transformation: An ongoing adventure. New Eastern Europe, Issue 6/2018, pp. 87-91
Bakar Berekashvili & Tato Khundadze, The long road to Democracy. International Politics and Society, 25 June, 2018
I am a historian teaching at the University of Vienna, Institute for Eastern European History, and a fellow of RECET. I acquired my venia docendi in 2020 with a thesis about Language and Loyalty in the Habsburg Army, 1867-1918. Since completing my doctoral thesis in 2007 about the state of emergency during First World War, I have been working at several institutions in Austria and abroad, among them my early post doc project about the Austro-Hungarian presence in Sanjak Novi Pazar, 1879-1908 at Andrássy University in Budapest, and with a Dobrovský Fellowship at the Masaryk Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. Currently, I am also heading a research project entitled Turning a forgotten Burial Place of 450 Austro-Hungarian Soldiers from First World War in Rome into a 21st Century Memorial at the Pontifical Institute Santa Maria dell'Anima in Rome.
Visiting Fellowship in December 2023
I will use my fellowship at INZ to conduct academic exchanges and gather information to complete a project proposal aimed at examining the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and the late Austrian Habsburg state in terms of language diversity. There are a number of images and depictions that show Emperor and King Franz Joseph kneeling before a Roman Catholic cleric. Such images were intentional representations. The monarch described his position as given by God's grace with the corresponding task: for God, Emperor and Fatherland. He thus placed himself under God, but not under Roman Catholic institutions, for he possessed a number of prerogatives. In many matters of Roman Catholic church institutions he had the last word. How these prerogatives were administered in dualistic Austria has rarely been addressed in historiography. As in many other matters of state, Francis Joseph governed his law through a bureaucracy subordinate to him, from the ministries down to the provinces, which overlooked the many municipalities. Roman Catholic Church authorities had to follow this bureaucratic process when something needed state approval. The scholars working at INZ have excellent expertise on many aspects of my planned research focus, and there are also numerous archives and libraries in Ljubljana. Both will contribute to the substantiation of my hypotheses and research questions.
Publications
Die Nationalitäten- und Sprachenvielfalt in der österreichisch-ungarischen Armee (1867-1918), Wien: BMLV, 2022. [Language Diversity and Loyalty in the Habsburg Army, habilitations thesis, available open access: https://utheses.univie.ac.at/detail/57914#
with Clemens Ruthner, Österreich-Ungarn und Bosnien-Herzegowina, 1878-1918: Annäherungen an eine Kolonie. Tübingen: Francke, 2018.
with Rok Stergar, Ethnic Boxes: The Unintended Consequences of Habsburg Bureaucratic Classification, in: Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity, 46, 4 (2018), 575-591.
The Non-Uniformity of the Church: Language Diversity and the Roman Catholic Dioceses in late Habsburg Austria, in: Annales, Series Historia et Sociologia (will be published 2023).
Find all publications in full text here:
Biography:
I am currently a fourth-year PhD researcher at the History Department at the European University Institute in Florence, working on a thesis on underwear production in socialist and postsocialist small-town Poland entitled “The history of capitalism from below: Undergarment production in socialist and postsocialist small-town Poland, 1949-2023”. Supervised by Prof. Glenda Sluga, my work explores how Central and Eastern Europe’s transition from Eastern Bloc socialist states to a liberal democratic member of the EU was experienced at the local level.
In my work, I examine the history of the undergarment industry in small towns in central Poland since 1949. I am particularly interested in the Corsetry Workers Cooperative in Głowno from its establishment in 1949 until the present day, as the region remains a center for small businesses producing underwear. My aim is to understand how the introduction of capitalism to Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 and 1991, 1990s globalization, and EU enlargement in 2004 have shaped the organization of labor, gender practices, and family life. While my work focuses on small-town Poland, I aim to treat it as a case study that presents historical transitions at local and national levels, and also more broadly, at the level of the Eastern Bloc region and the international world order.
I am also interested in global socialist literature, queer studies and contemporary social theories. I am a part of Queer and Feminist Working Group at EUI.
Visiting fellowship November 2023
Motivation:
My motivation to participate in the Fellowship at the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana stems from several key factors. I am eager to access and utilize the extensive collections available at the INZ Library, which will significantly enhance my research capabilities. I am also committed to refining and expanding my academic work, including work connected to the article manuscript and the completion of a chapter for my dissertation on memory of economic and political changes marked by the year 1989 in Poland. I anticipate that the collaborative environment at INZ will provide valuable inspiration and intellectual exchange to support these goals.
Lastly, my motivation is also rooted in the opportunity to engage in consultations with experienced historians and academics, not only at INZ but also at other institutions in Ljubljana. This exchange of ideas and knowledge will further enrich my research and contribute to a fruitful fellowship experience.I believe that the stay in Ljubljana will significantly strengthen my thesis project by allowing me to enter a network of academics working on similar region, time scope, and methodology, especially the bottom-up history and everyday experience in Eastern Europe around the 1989 transition from socialist state to neoliberal democracies.
Publications (a selection):
“(They look better on the breasts): advertisement, sexuality, and the bra business in postsocialist Poland” at Gender and Materiality in Central and Eastern Europe in the XX century / Special Issue of Connexe. Exploring Post- communist Spaces (in preparation)
”Black Protest. Towards a New Abortion Compromise?” (in Polish), co-author with Małgorzata Druciarek and Izabela Przybysz,” Research, Expertise, Recommendations” series, Gender Equality Observatory, Institute of Public Affairs, Warsaw 2017 ISBN: 978-83-7689-259-7
”Polish Attitude Towards Other Nations” (in Polish), author of the article featured in ”Social-political and Psychological Studies”, Ivan Franco National University of Zhytomyr, University of Warsaw, Zhytomyr, Warsaw 2017 UDC: 316: 32: 159:9 C 88
Biography:
I am Reader in European History at Brunel University London and I am interested in the history of borders, borderlands, nationhood and the centre-periphery relationship in modern Europe. In 2018, my book The Return of Alsace to France 1918-1939 was published by Oxford University Press. This research asked what happened when Alsace returned to French rule after almost fifty years of annexation into the Germany Empire, and traced the various policies that the French government introduced as they attempted to integrate the region, as well as the ways in which these initiatives were adopted, appropriated, resisted and rejected by the population in Alsace. I am now working on a history of the idea of the Channel tunnel. This research is supported by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, and traces plans and schemes for a fixed link between France and Britain back to the first proposal made to Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802, and asks what these proposals tell us about shifting ideas about borders, connection and belonging during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and draws upon state and civil society records in France, Britain, Switzerland and Belgium.
Visiting fellowship November 2023 and June 2024
Motivation:
I am delighted to be joining the Institute for Contemporary History as a Visiting Fellow, and will use my time in Ljubljana to seed cooperation, to build networks and to foster dialogue that seeks to integrate different European histories. Across my work on borders, I have argued that it is impossible to understand the experiences of distinct borderlands in isolation and I have attempted to compare experiences, to consider the flows of people, goods and ideas that crossed borders, and to understand the ways in which thinking about borders was bound up with wider geopolitical concerns. I have also attempted to bring histories of east and west Europe into conversation, and these aims will underpin my fellowship, which will be split across two stays, first in November 2023 and then in June 2024, I will spend this time scoping joint funding projects in order to develop a collaborative funding application on the theme of borders, nationalism and belonging with colleagues from the Institute. Alongside this scoping, I will also investigate a joint conference panel, and organise reciprocal research presentations at the Institute and at Brunel University London.
Selected Recent Publications:
Alison Carrol, ‘Navigations of National Belonging. Law and the Legal Reintegration of Alsace into France, 1918-1939’ in Emmanuel Dalle Mulle, David Rodogno and Mona Bieling (eds) Sovereignty, Nationalism and the Quest for Homogeneity in Interwar Europe (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Alison Carrol, ‘Les passages de la frontière franco-allemande en Alsace dans l’entre-deux-guerres,’ in Segolène Plyer (ed.) Frontière et mobilités après 1918 (Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2022)
Alison Carrol, ‘Crossing Borders. The Making of France’s Eastern Frontier in Alsace, 1919-1939,’ French History 35: 1 (2021), 70-91
Alison Carrol ‘Winemaking and the Politics of Identity in Interwar Alsace,’ Contemporary European History, 29: 4 (2020), 380 - 393.
Alison Carrol, ‘Paths to Frenchness. National Indifference and the Return of Alsace to France’ in M. van Ginderachter and J. Fox (eds) National Indifference and the History of Nationalism in Modern Europe (Routledge, 2019)
Alison Carrol, The Return of Alsace to France, 1918-1939 (Oxford University Press, 2018)
Biography:
Since 2020, I have been a PhD student and young researcher at the Social Communication Research Centre at the Faculty of Social Sciences in Ljubljana. In my PhD thesis Autonomy of Journalism and the Journalist's Action in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia [Avtonomija novinarstva in novinarjevega delovanja v Socialistični federativni republiki Jugoslaviji], I research the social and political influences on journalism, journalistic autonomy and journalists' ability to act and work autonomously in this period. I completed my undergraduate studies in Journalism (2018) and my postgraduate studies in Sociology (2020) at the same faculty, and in parallel studied Philosophy and Sociology at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana.
Between 2020 and 2022, I was involved in the research project The Role of Communication Inequalities in Disintegration of Multinational Society [Vloga komunikacijskih neenakosti v dezintegraciji večnacionalne družbe] (Slovenian Research Agency), in the framework of which I and Jernej Amon Prodnik, PhD, conducted research interviews (37) with journalists who worked professionally in the SFRY. Later, as part of my PhD project, I independently conducted research interviews with former journalists in Croatia (Zagreb) and Serbia (Belgrade). In my PhD thesis I combine a critical analysis of archival material (Archives of the Republic of Slovenia, Archives of Yugoslavia in Belgrade) with an oral history approach in the form of research interviews with former journalists.
During my PhD studies, I presented my papers at several national and international doctoral and scientific conferences: Central and Eastern European Communication and Media Conference (2021), symposium Contradictions of Media and Journalism in Socialist Yugoslavia [Protislovja medijev in novinarstva v socialistični Jugoslaviji] (2022) at the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana (2022), doctoral conference New Perspectives in Humanities and Social Sciences at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana (2023), ECREA – European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School at the Roskilde University in Denmark (2023), doctoral summer school and scientific conference at the Centre for Cultural and Historical Research of Socialism in Pula, Croatia (2023).
My research interests focus on the study of journalism in socialist Yugoslavia, journalistic autonomy, different forms of information and communication systems (e.g. in socialist projects) and the history of political and social ideas and their normative exploration.
Visiting fellowship October and December 2023
Motivation:
In the academic year 2023/2024, I will complete my PhD project Autonomy of Journalism and the Journalist’s Action in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia [Avtonomija novinarstva in novinarjevega delovanja v Socialistični federativni republiki Jugoslaviji] and begin with the systematic writing of my doctoral monograph and presenting the conclusions of three years of research. The completion of the complex research I am conducting as part of my PhD project was the main motivation for applying for the Visiting Fellowship at the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana. My main areas of research are journalism, sociology and philosophy. The cooperation with the historians at the Institute, who deal with socialist Yugoslavia and its various phenomena in a professional, research-oriented and epistemological way, brings me a different disciplinary perspective on my PhD topic and opens up the possibility of thematic horizons that I have not yet reached/seen. I therefore see the research collaboration as an opportunity to improve the quality of my research work, the interpretations of the results of my PhD thesis and my professional development.
Publications:
Žnidaršič, Nina. (2022). The Journalist’s Action in Socialist Yugoslavia: Understanding the Formulation ‘Journalist as a Socio-political Worker’. Prispevki za novejšo zgodovino 62(1), pp. 82–102.
Žnidaršič Nina, Kaluža Jernej (2023). Strpnost kot sestavni del solidarnosti: primer socialistična Jugoslavije [Tolerance as an Element of Solidarity: the case of Socialist Yugoslavia]. Dialogi 59(5/6), pp. 144–158.
Biography:
Dr. Milica Popović (Sciences Po CERI) is a political scientist, specializing in Memory Studies, Political Sociology and Higher Education Studies. She obtained a PhD in Comparative Political Sociology at Sciences Po Paris and in Balkan studies at the University of Ljubljana. She has been Postdoctoral Fellow and Project Lead at the Global Observatory on Academic Freedom at Central European University in Vienna from 2021 to 2023, and for her work at CEU she is a recipient of DAAD Fundamental Academic Values Award for Early Career Scientists. Popović also worked as a lecturer at Sciences Po Paris.Currently, she is working as an independent researcher and consultant on various projects within and beyond higher education, including her contractual researcher position at the Institut Jacques Delors in Paris, where she researches issues regarding the Western Balkans and accession to the European Union. She has been Fernandes Visiting Fellow at the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick (November 2021), and has been awarded a Visegrad Scholarship Fund at Open Society Archives in Budapest for January/February 2024. While finalizing her monograph on Yugonostalgia and the memory narratives of the generation of the last pioneers in the (post)Yugoslav space, she is currently developing a new research project on the memory narratives of deserters in Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.
Visiting Fellowship October 2023
Motivation:
A one-month stay at INZ in Ljubljana will be the most important first phase of the development of my new project under the tentative title "The silence of saying no. Narrating desertion". Putting the act of desertion and draft resistance in the frame of cultural memory studies and political sociology, the project aims to answer the question how, in the interplay of public and private, memory narratives create a story of the deserter of the Yugoslav wars in today’s (post)Yugoslav space. The project aims to expand the cultural understanding of desertion in a post-conflict society: understanding colored by dissent and resistance, shame, and silence. With little, if any, official data accessible, silence in public spaces, and hegemonic discourses, the narratives of deserters throughout Europe and history remain silenced, hiding the cracks in the monolith nationalist discourses of victors and victims.
Even 30 years after the wars in Yugoslavia started, we faced a lack of knowledge on the topic. The desertion rates in Serbia, all unofficial, appear in various reports in the range of 40–90%. As for some, desertion was not an option, due to a number of reasons much more complex than the issue of their personal agreement or not with the war; some desertion did not translate into an articulation of anti-militarism and anti-war activism (Aleksov 2013). This mnemonic community, beyond activists, has so far remained unresearched. Not necessarily heroes or anti-war leaders, the ordinary deserters have nonetheless refused to participate in the ethno-nationally framed Yugoslav wars. In the aftermath of the war, the last Yugoslav Defense Minister, Veljko Kadijević, claimed that draft resisters and deserters were the key factors for undermining the capacity of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) in the Yugoslav wars (Kadijević 1993) and thus, possibly, contributing to the shorter duration of the conflict and end of the war. Already in 1995, Stojan Cerović, a famous opposition journalist, called for the erection of a monument to An Unknown Deserter – as the only true heroes of the Yugoslav wars who deserve a monument. Yet, to this day there is not a single monument in the (post)Yugoslav space dedicated to deserters and draft resisters. In squatted art spaces and digital museums, some memory is preserved, yet without any significant impact on hegemonic memory discourses.
During my stay at INZ, I would like to conduct archival research in the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia, as well as the initial mapping of other relevant data, including the nongovernmental archives and mapping of possible interviewees. The purpose of my stay would also be an excellent opportunity to develop and deepen my contact with colleagues in Slovenia, with the aim of finding suitable collaborators for the project.
List of publications (selection):
Popović, Milica, Matei, Liviu and Joly, Daniele. (2022). Changing Understandings of Academic Freedom in the World at the Time of Pandemic. Vienna: Global Observatory on Academic Freedom.
Popović, M. and Natalija Majsova. (eds.) (2020). Memory landscapes in (post)Yugoslavia. The Historical Expertise. 4 (25): 61-209.
Popović, M. and Rupnik, J. (2019). Dopo la Iugoslavia: dalla dissoluzione alla iugonostalgia e alla iugosfera. In Europa. Un’ utopia in construzione. Culture e società. Vol. III. Pp. 93-100. Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani.
Popović, M. (2018). Yugonostalgia – the Meta-National Memory Narratives of the Last Pioneers. In Nostalgia on the Move. Pp. 42-50. Belgrade: Museum of Yugoslavia.
Popović, M. (2016). Exhibiting Yugoslavia. Družboslovne Razprave. 32(81): 7-24.
Popović, M. (2015). La Yougonostalgie – la Yougoslavie au regard des derniers pionniers. Etudes Balkaniques. 2013/1-2014/1 (19/20): 303-324, https://doi.org/10.3917/balka.019.0303
Popović, M. and Belc, P. (2014). Jugonostalgija – Jugoslavija kao metaprostor u suvremenim umjetničkim praksama/Yugonostalgia – Yugoslavia as a meta-space in contemporary art practices. Život umjetnosti. 94 (1): 18-35.
Biography:
I am currently enrolled as a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the Central European University in Vienna. My main focus is the study of radicalization of rightwing and fascist groups in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. I am interested to see what the dynamics were of engaging in political violence on the radical right spectrum, as well as the causes of their deradicalization. My second hat concerns digital humanities, as I am interested in the potentials for natural language analysis in the study of history. My two current interests focus on the issues of authorship detection by using stylometric methods, and on the links between ideology and actions by using sentiment analysis methods.
Visiting Fellowship August-September 2023
Motivation:
INZ seemed like an obvious choice when I was applying for a fellowship position due to the fact that Slovenia has a rather developed academic network regarding digital humanities and computational research methods. During my previous work I came to rely on several digital tools, like the CLASSLA library, so it was only natural that I would come and expand my knowledge in this growing field. In that regard, I hope that I will gain some valuable insights and experience in the field of digital humanities while working with Dr Andrej Pančur and Dr Nikola Ljubešić.
Biography:
I am a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Cambridge, researching vernacular and contesting dimensions of the human right to self-determination developing in socialist Yugoslavia (1960-1990). My research, supervised by Dr Celia Donert, contributes to histories of European and global socialism, human rights and the international order, Yugoslav social movements, and connects histories of nationalism, federalism, and internationalism. I am fully funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Isaac Newton Trust. I hold a double-first in the Bachelor of Arts (History Tripos) (2017-2020) and Distinction in the MPhil for Modern European History (2020-2021), both at the University of Cambridge.
I co-convene the Modern European History Workshop for postgraduate students, am the Graduate Communications Officer for the Modern European History subgroup (Twitter @MEHCambridge), and am a Postgraduate Member of the Royal Historical Society and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA).
In addition to my academic work, my interest in human rights has led to internships and advocacy work at the United Nations, AIRE (Advice on Individual Rights in Europe) Centre, Office of the High Representative in Bosnia, and other groups and organisations.
Motivation:
My Fellowship comes one-and-a-half years into my PhD, when I am in the midst of gathering archival sources and progressing with writing projects. I hope that the exchange of ideas with colleagues at the INZ will generate inspiration at this creative stage of my doctoral dissertation; I would particularly like to engage in consultations with historians at INZ and other Ljubljana institutes as I sketch out my third chapter. I will use the INZ and National and University Library for source collection for this chapter. I hope additionally to finish the draft of my second research chapter for my dissertation as well as revise and finish an article manuscript for publication. Finally, I hope to engage especially with the political history programme group at INZ, and to improve my Slovenian language skills!
Visiting fellowship Jul 26 - Sep 16, 2023
Publications:
Helena Stolnik Trenkić, 'Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement: Social, Cultural, Political, and Economic Imaginaries ed. by Paul Stubbs (review)' Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 101, No. 1 (January 2023), pp. 183-185.
Chiara Bonfiglioli is a Lecturer in Gender & Women’s Studies at University College Cork, Ireland, where she also coordinates the one-year interdisciplinary Masters in Women’s Studies. She completed a PhD at Utrecht University in 2012, and held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Pula, and the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
In 2023 she received an ERC Consolidator grant for her project titled WO-NAM. Women and Non-Alignment in the Cold War era: biographical and intersectional perspectives.
Visiting fellowship May 16-25, 2023
During my stay in Ljubljana, in view of my next monograph on women and Non-Alignment, I will be researching further the life trajectory of Vida Tomšič, particularly in relation to the history of interwar social movements, antifascism and WWII in Slovenia.
Selected publications:
Women and Industry in the Balkans. The Rise and Fall of the Yugoslav Textile Sector, 2019 (I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury)
“Representing Women’s Non-Aligned encounters: a view from Yugoslavia”. In Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement: Social, Cultural, Political, and Economic Imaginaries (edited by Paul Stubbs), 2023.Co-authored with S. Žerić, “Working Class Women’s Activism in Socialist Yugoslavia: An Exploration of Archives from Varaždin, Croatia”, Comparative Southeast European Studies, 70 (1), 80-102, 2022.
“State socialist women’s organizations within Yugoslav factories: a case study of local activism in the Duga Resa cotton mill”, Social History, 47(1), 85-104, 2022.
“Women’s internationalism and Yugoslav-Indian connections: from the Non-Aligned Movement to the UN Decade for Women”, Nationalities Papers, 49(3), 446-461, 2021.
I am a historian of modern Europe in a Eurasian context, finishing a doctoral dissertation at Yale University. My dissertation, “Tomorrow Belongs to Me: Coming of Age in the Other Europe, 1813–1914,” studies how the transition to adulthood changed in Europe’s “bourgeois century.” Each chapter of its first part studies a different life course – land inheritors, rural and urban servants, future artisans, emigrating youth, and university students – from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Then, the shorter second part asks how youth emerged in the political sphere, how youth movements emerged, and how youth power was depicted in fiction between Romanticism and Modernism.
My work incorporates a macro-sociological lens, a synthetic approach, and a sensitivity to language. My early studies included Semitic philology, early Islamic studies, and Russian imperial history. While I focus on other topics now, I retain the desire to build large frameworks and construct broad narratives that explain social change. This desire has accompanied me throughout my studies. Also accompanying me is a wide range of languages I have been studying since my first classes at the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies. My work utilizes sources in most Ottoman and Habsburg languages.
Visiting fellowship June-July, 2023
I am coming to the Institute of Contemporary History after a year and a half of library work. Since January 2022, I have worked in Switzerland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Israel, Austria, Czechia, and Slovakia. These trips – alongside earlier work in Georgia and work from a distance in Albania and Poland – have formed the backbone of my dissertation. My fellowship at the Institute, thus, comes at a transitory moment between finalizing my dissertation and embarking on a post-doctoral project.
Three goals bring me to Ljubljana:
1. Archival work in Slovenia and Croatia, especially on the intersection between language, education, and social inequality. I am lucky to have received an APE Research Grant from the Archival Portal European Foundation. Their funding will allow me to conduct this research in Ljubljana’s archives and libraries and in Maribor, Celje, Ptuj, Koper, Zagreb, Rijeka, and Pazin.
2. Forging stronger connections in Slovenia. My work exposed me to Slovenia’s rich historiographical tradition in Slovenia. Shared projects and conferences have sprouted interactions with Slovene scholars, both at the Institute and at other Slovene universities, which I hope to strengthen while in residence. I am especially interested in Dr. Remec’s project on Suicide and Its Perceptions in Slovenia, 1850–2000; Dr. Panjek's longue durée study of Tomaj, and Dr. Stergar’s project on schools and identifications/identities.
3. So far, I have been a passive user of Slovene. My advanced command of Serbo-Croatian overpowers my Slovene and Bulgarian when I try to speak and write: perhaps a long enough stay in Slovenia would change that!
Selected publications:
“What is Austro-Hungarian History to the Eurasianist?” Journal of Austrian Studies 56, no. 2 (2023): 21–30.
“Is Adolescence Culturally Transferred? Is it Universal? Why Should the Social Historian Care?” In Cultural Transfer Europe-Serbia: Methodological Issue and Challenges, ed. Slobodan G. Markovich (Belgrade: Faculty of Political Sciences, 2023), 175–86.
“Social Stratification and Job Market Anxieties in Nineteenth-Century Central Europe,” Journal of Social History 56, no. 2 (2022): 439–62.
“Female Rule in Imperial Russia: Is Gender a Useful Category of Historical Analysis?” In A Companion to Global Queenship: An Examination of Female Rule and Political Agency in the Premodern World, ed. Elena Woodacre. Bradford: ARC Humanities Press, 2018.
“Judentum, Islam und Russische Revolution: Betrachtungen aus der Sicht vergleichender Geschichtswissenschaft” [Judaism, Islam, and the Russian Revolution: Observations from Comparative History], Arbeit - Bewegung - Geschichte 15, no. 2 (2017): 65–84.
“Tolstoy in the Caucasus: Noble Savages and Imperialist Identities” in Critical Insights: Leo Tolstoy, ed. Rachel Stauffer. Ipswich: Salem Press, 2017.
Mara A. Yerkes is Professor of Comparative Social Policy in relation to Social Inequalities at the Department of Interdisciplinary Social Science, Utrecht University, the Netherlands and Research Associate at the Center for Social Development in Africa at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Her research broadly centres on comparative social policy (including national and local welfare state policy and industrial relations), social inequalities (related to work, care, communities and families, in particular relating to gender, generations, and sexual orientation) and their interplays.
Yerkes is the principal investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) project CAPABLE, a comparative study on gender inequalities in work-life balance in eight European countries, and of CoGIS-NL (COVID-19 Gender (In)equality Survey Netherlands), a longitudinal research project involving researchers from Utrecht University and Radboud University Nijmegen. She is the author of numerous articles and books, including Transforming the Dutch Welfare State: Social Risks and Corporatist Reform (2011; Policy Press) and two co-edited volumes appearing in 2022: Solidarity and Social Justice in Contemporary Societies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding Social Inequalities (from Palgrave), and Social Policy in Changing European Societies: Research Agendas for the 21st Century (Edward Elgar).
Visiting fellowship May 3-9, 2023
My motivation for coming for a short stay to the Institute of Contemporary History is the desire to learn more about the history of gender relations in Slovenia, situated with Slovenia’s economic and social development. I will use this knowledge to inform the progress of research being conducted within my European Research Council project CAPABLE, a study which maps and investigates the role of national and local policies across Europe and how these resources affect men and women’s real opportunities to balance their work with their private lives. Slovenia is one of the case studies in the project, and I look forward to hearing more about Slovenia’s political and social history to help with the contextualization of our research findings.
Selected publications:
K. Nelson, R. Nieuwenhuis, M.A. Yerkes. (Eds). 2022. Social Policy in Changing European Societies. Research Agendas for the 21st Century. Edward Elgar.
Yerkes, M.A. and M. Bal. (Eds). 2022. Solidarity and Social Justice in Contemporary Societies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding Social Inequalities. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
Yerkes, M.A., J. Javornik and A. Kurowska. (Eds). 2019. Social Policy and the Capability Approach: Concepts, Measurements and Application. Bristol: Policy Press.
Yerkes, M.A. 2011. Transforming the Dutch Welfare State: Social Risks and Corporatist Reform. Bristol: Policy Press.
Remery, C., R.J. Petts, J. Schippers, & M.A. Yerkes. 2022. “Gender and employment: Recalibrating women’s position in work, organizations, and society in times of COVID-19.” Gender, Work and Organization, 29(6), 1927–1934. link
Yerkes, M.A., S. Andre, C. Remery, M. Salin,M. Hakovirta, M. van Gerven, 2022, “Unequal but Balanced: Highly educated mothers’ perceptions of work-life balance during the COVID-19 lockdown in Finland and the Netherlands.” Journal of European Social Policy 32(4): 376-392. link
Yerkes, M.A., S. André, J. Besamusca, P. Kruyen, C. Remery, R. van der Zwan, D. Beckers, S. Geurts. 2020. “‘Intelligent’ lockdown, intelligent effects? Results from a survey on gender (in)equality in paid work, the division of childcare and household work, and quality of life among parents in the Netherlands during the Covid-19 lockdown.” PLOS ONE, link.
Yerkes, M.A., M. Hoogenboom and J. Javornik. 2020. “Where’s the Community in Community, Work and Family? A Community-based Capabilities Approach.” Community, Work and Family 23(5): 516-533.
Biography
Since 2010 I have worked at the Department of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade. I teach courses at the level of undergraduate, master and doctoral studies. My research interests include Anglo-American modernism, history of literary criticism, intellectual history, feminist theory and criticism, periodical studies, as well as critical and feminist pedagogy.
I wrote two monographs: 1) Rod, modernost i emancipacija. Uredničke politike u časopisima Žena (1911–1914) i The Freewoman (1911–1912) (Beograd: Fabrika knjiga, 2017) and 2) Periodika u feminističkoj učionici. Časopis Ženski pokret (1920–1938) i studije književnosti (Beograd: Fabrika knjiga, 2021). The first one is focused on examining the notions of gender, modernity and emancipation in two politically and culturally different contexts, taking as examples the journals Žena / The Woman (1911–1914) and The Freewoman (1911–1912). The second monograph links feminist theory and criticism, literary studies and periodical studies while analysing the journal Ženski pokret / The Women’s Movement (1920-1938).
Currently, I am exploring the concepts of national/transnational literature as well as “border writing”, focusing on writers who developed their careers on both sides of national borders (e.g. in Serbia and Hungary).
Motivation
I have already cooperated with several researchers who work at the Institute of Contemporary History. The cooperation has been initiated through application for a bilateral project in May 2022 (results of the CfA are expected by May 2023). Members of the proposed bilateral project plan to focus on the analysis of the relationship between gender (as culturally and socially constructed characteristics of sex) and intellectual history in Serbian and Slovenian 20th-century periodical press.
Furthermore, I participated in the workshop on Intellectual History at Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena in July 2022 (among organizers was Isidora Grubački, INZ research assistant) and, with colleagues from University of Tübingen, co-organized the workshop “Lessons on Resilience from Literary Studies and Intellectual History: Feminist Pedagogies for a Post-Pandemic Future“ at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade in March 2023 (in which several INZ researchers particpated). As a group, we are interested in applying for the COST Action that would bring together scholars who explore intellectual history from various perspectives and disciplines.
I hope to use the Visiting Fellowship Program to meet with and talk to some of the Institute’s researchers whom I already met, as well as with others interested in intellectual history. During these meetings, we plan to work on the concrete application for the COST Action and discuss potential partner institutions, as well as to explore possibilities for further institutional cooperation through future joint projects (like Horizon).
SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY
Duration: April 27 - May 19
Biography
I am a doctoral student of Southeast and East European History at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. I am writing my dissertation on Sino-Yugoslav relations in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I would like to understand why the bilateral relations between the People’s Republic of China and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia intensely warmed up in the years 1977-78, reached the peak around 1979-80 and then gradually stagnated in the eighties (yet remaining very friendly). I am trying to approach the question by analysing Chinese state media’s discourse on Yugoslavia, economists and other social scientists’ studies of Yugoslavia and bilateral people-to-people exchanges. Specifically, my research is concerned with a Chinese interest to learn from Yugoslavia’s socialism, in an era when Yugoslavia itself was sinking into deep crises.
My broad research interests include history of Yugoslavia(s), history of nationalism, and transnational history of socialist ideas and practices.
Motivation
I look forward to working at the Institute of Contemporary History. Among the researchers at the Institute, Dr Maja Lukanc (on diplomacy of Yugoslavia), Dr Marko Zajc (on intellectuals of Slovenia) and Dr Marta Rendla (on social-economic history of socialism in Slovenia) have conducted research on topics close to my interests. I look forward to learning from them, and I hope we can eventually cooperate.
My research will be greatly helped by the works on Yugoslav self-management and diplomacy in the library at the Institute and the National and University Library. Slovenia is particularly interesting for my project, not only because the most developed republic of Yugoslavia provoked a different imagination of socialism in Chinese visitors’ minds, but also because the theory of self-management was critiqued in Slovenia at the same time when the Chinese scholars became enthusiastic about it. I also plan to work at the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia, where documents related to visiting Chinese delegations and outgoing Slovenian delegations to China, as well as Edvard Kardelj’s documents are stored. I also hope to improve my command of the Slovene language.
List of publications
Visiting duration: March - June, 2023.
Biography
I am a historian, who graduated in 2005 and obtained a Magister’s degree in 2008 from the Philosophical Faculty in Belgrade, Serbia. In 2015, I obtained a PhD in General History from the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. Apart from the period of 2018–2020, when I taught General European and World History at the Institute of History of the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Hradec Králové, Czech Republic, I have been working as a scientific researcher at the Institute for Recent History of Serbia in Belgrade (2007–2010), at the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Prague (2015–2021), at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague (2017–2019, 2020–2022), as well as at the Institute of History of the CAS in Prague (from 2021 to present date). Since the beginning of my career, I have been dealing with the history of Yugoslavia, Yugoslav-Czechoslovak relations, and the history of the states of Central and Southeastern Europe, topics about which I have published many studies in Czech and foreign periodicals, including two monographs (one in Serbian, one in Czech). Some of my newest research topics at the Institute of History of the CAS concern the situation in the Balkans, through the actions of Czechoslovak diplomacy from the end of WWII, through the early post-war period, the Yugoslav-Soviet split in 1948, and the end of the Greek Civil War. I am dealing too with the topic of the formation, development and disappearance of national identity in the Yugoslav territory, about which I am currently leading a one project of the Czech Academy of Sciences (research program of the AV21 Strategy “Anatomy of European Society, History, Tradition, Culture, Identity”), with the title Centralist Ambitions and Peripheral Reality: A Comparison and Analysis of the Relations of National, Regional and Local Identities in Yugoslavia.
Visiting Fellowship (March 2023)
The Visiting Fellowship Program at the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana is an opportunity to cooperate with colleagues at that Institute with similar scientific interest and to discuss the possible proposal for a Slovenian-Czech bilateral project (e.g. Mobility Plus Projects of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the CAS). I would be interested to cooperate with Jurij Hadalin and Maja Lukanc and to discuss a project proposal for above-mentioned competition. I would like to use a visit to the Institute of Contemporary History too for research in the library of the Institute, as well as in the National and University Library in Ljubljana. At the same time, this is also a great opportunity to advance my academic progress.
Last relevant publicastions
Visiting duration: March 9 - March 19, 2023
Short bio:
Lea Horvat (*1990, Zagreb) is a postdoctoral lecturer at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Department of Cultural History. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Hamburg and an MA in Art History and Comparative Literature from the University of Zagreb. Her dissertation project Baustelle, Wohnung, Siedlung, Bild: Eine Kulturgeschichte des Massenwohnbaus im sozialistischen Jugoslawien und danach (defense: January 2022; grade: summa cum laude) was supported by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes). She was a teaching fellow at the Humboldt University of Berlin, the Center for Women’s Studies in Zagreb, and the University of Leipzig and a visiting scholar at the Iowa State University (College of Design) and at the Leibniz Science Campus “Eastern Europe — Global Area” in Leipzig. She is editor and co-founder of the platform Women* Write the Balkans.
Her research interests lie at the intersection of the modern built environment, feminism, everyday life in Southeast Europe, Food Studies, and popular culture.
Motivation:
In my habilitation project, A Taste of Caffeinated Emancipation: Coffee, Cafés, and Gender in the Habsburg Empire (18th-early 20th century), I explore the issues of spatial justice, imperial dynamics within the Habsburg Empire as well as the colonial exploitation underlying the emergent mass coffee cultures. On the one hand, I am interested in the feminist history of the built environment — the access to and design of (pseudo-)public spaces in imperial contexts. On the other hand, I pay close attention to the cultural history of trade and extractivist practices detaching coffee’s country of origin and cultivation from the place of consumption. My case studies stem from a range of urban centers where various coffee and gendered regimes overlapped; Ljubljana is one of them.
I intend to use the time at the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana in two crucial ways. First, I plan to gather essential archival sources on coffeehouses and related associations. Second, the fellowship offers an excellent framework for conveying future sustainable cooperations such as workshops or conferences, the formation of research networks, and bilateral programs such as Erasmus+ Blended Mobility and DAAD partnerships.
Publications:
Visiting duration: March - April, 2023
Biography:
I am a PhD candidate at the Department of History (Southeast European History and Anthropology) at the University of Graz and a DOC-fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In my dissertation, I am working on organized amateur film practices and productions from the period of the Long Sixties in Yugoslavia. With a perspective of everyday life, I am exploring how non-professional film makers made sense of, broached, coped with, and visualized the political, social and cultural aspects in a period of rapid transformation. Grounds to my research is a film corpus of nearly two hundred films from various Yugoslav ciné clubs, and a large corpus of (film-) journal articles and manuals about and for film amateurs. The analysis of formal aspects, subject matters, and discourses allows to understand the ambivalences of organized amateur film making at the intersection of a rationalized system of education and leisure on the one hand and the practices creative subjects on the other.
My research interests of visual, cultural and gender history stem from my education in history (MA), gender studies (MA) and cultural sciences (BA). A few years ago, I had the opportunity to combine my research and artistic work during a residency program in Maribor, where I was able to put my own amateur film ambitions in practice and enhance the ways of visualizing research processes: https://vimeo.com/252132280
Publications:
Motivation:
My stay at the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana coincides with archival work for my research at the National Archive of Slovenia, the Cinematheque and +MSUM. Furthermore, I will work on the finalization of research chapters for my dissertation and a planned publication of a special issue on amateur film practices. However, the stay at INZ is especially interesting for me in terms of building of individual and institutional cooperation. The overlapping between my field of research and the work that is done at the institute, promises a productive and inspiring exchange. Additionally, I am interested in the ongoing building of a digital humanities research group, especially in the area of digital visual analysis and archives—such as the Graz based VASE (Visual Archive Southeastern Europe)—which I see as a great potential too also archive films and thus offer them to a wider public and researchers at the same time.
Visiting duration: March - May, 2023
Project and Bio
I am currently working as a research assistant in the research training group “Cultures of Critique” at the Leuphana University in Lüneburg (Germany). My dissertation focuses on “primitive communism as a narrative” and is positioned at the border between history of knowledge and literary history. ‘Prehistory’ forms a kind of ‘impossible knowledge’ because everything known about ‘prehistory’ is necessarily fractured - the term itself being an oxymoron. As a result, narrative methods are used to develop and solidify the period of ‘prehistory’. One of my main theses is that whenever history seeks to fill in the inherent gaps in ‘prehistory’, it generates an aesthetic that is fundamentally political. This is especially evident in my case study. I investigate how the narrative of ‘primitive communism’ developed at the intersection of politics and ethnography in the 19th and 20th centuries, building on much older themes, such as the idea of a ‘state of nature’ or a ‘golden age’. Since the expansion of this idea is not linear, I explore a variety of different genres, including texts from the fields of political economy, political theory, ethnology, and fiction.
My research interests stem from my background in literary history, literary theory, and cultural history. During my time as a student at the University of Tübingen and the Ilia State University of Tbilisi I specifically focused on cultural theory such as poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and narratology. Therefore, I tend to look at my sources through this framework of cultural studies. That is also why one of my main interests is the methodology of history and the questions about the possibility and the aesthetics of knowledge. Within my research I try to be open about new ways of thinking about history.
Motivation
One of the themes that is crucial for my work is the perception of ‘peasant economies’ in the work of writers like Marx and Engels as well as in the novels of German revolutionary and artist B. Traven. Since there are a couple of projects affiliated with the institute, I am looking forward to exchange ideas.
I am also interested in the imperial production of knowledge and how this is reflected and criticised in history from other points of view that have developed a critical postcolonial mindset. Finally, I am interested in the development of ideas about futures or utopias, since the actors in my study have very specific idea about their future that is developed alongside historical ideas. In my perception, these fields revolve around ideas of the possibilities of knowledge, spatiality, and social critique. My stay in Ljubljana would be a great opportunity in forming a network in these fields. This could lead to transuniversitary cooperations like workshops, colloquia, or other programmes.
Visiting duration: Feb 3 – March 3, 2023
Short Bio
Currently I am completing the manuscript of my dissertation with the working title »Art, ethnography and the secret life of things, Petersburg 1890-1920«, focusing on a corpus of ethnographic objects that were photographed and declared to be 'Primitive Art' in Petersburg in the early 1910s by the russian-latvian artist and art historian Voldemārs Matvejs (by pen name Vladimir Markov). Methodologically, my project is inspired by Latour's actor-network theory and the history of knowledge. In accordance with Latour's dictum "follow the actors!", I trace the various paths of the objects until their appearance within Markov's publications. In doing so, I highlight different stages of the objects' journey from their contexts of origin into European collections and art. One of my main hypotheses is that the category of 'time' plays a central role in the different sets of knowledge that are co-produced with the objects in the different realms of imperial ethnography, ethnographic collections, and avant-garde art. The search for historical national and imperial 'origins' is present in turn-of-the-century Petersburg and can be observed in Markov's writings. I am not only interested in the entanglements between ethnography, archaeology, and art, but also in their appropriation in colonial/imperial metropolises as part of a genuinely modern project of self-positioning. Other research interests include postcolonial and environmental history, epistemological and ontological approaches to history as well as thinking about the boundaries between science and activism. In the last four years I have been working at the universities of Tübingen and Freiburg including stays at the Ilia university Tbilissi, RGGU Moscow and Institute of European History Mainz.
Aims for visiting fellowship (Jan 9 – March 3, 2023)
The clusters being currently researched at the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana – especially the considering of critical and environmental perspectives such as the questioning of ethnocentric, anthropocentric, national or imperial optics and their consequences for knowledge production – make it an attractive place for me both for sharing my current research and developing my post-doctoral project. As a historian of eastern Europe, academically socialized mostly in Germany, my perspective on ‘Eastern Europe’ was for a long time centered on Russia. During the last four years I came to see more and more the diversity of what is called ‘Eastern Europe’ as well as global, imperial and postcolonial entanglements. The International Colloquium on the History of Science in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, of which I have become a co-organizer since this year, has been a reason and (becoming a co-organizer) an outcome of this process. I would be very happy to share my networks to intensify both short and longterm cooperations like colloquia and workshops, maybe establishing a transuniversity reading group or digital colloquium or research network, which may lead also to establishing cooperation on an institutional level or applying together for binational funding programmes.
Publications
Bio:
I am a post-doctoral researcher for the ERC ‘War and Fun: Reconceptualizing Warfare and Its Experience’ research project at the Christian Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Norway.
I completed a Master of Arts in European Women’s and Gender History at the Department of Gender Studies at the Central European University (Budapest, Hungary/Vienna, Austria) in 2015 and I hold a PhD in Comparative History from the same university (2022).
My research interests include social history, especially women’s and gender history and the history of feminism in the state socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. My dissertation research focuses on the development of cultural memory of the People’s Liberation Struggle in Yugoslav popular media, with particular focus on the figure of the female soldier, the partizanka. In my current research I explore officially organized entertainment in the partisan army, especially partisan
theater, as propaganda, art, and fun.
Goals (Jan 1 – March 1, 2023):
I will spend two months at the INZ in the framework of the institute’s Visiting Fellowship Program. During my stay, I plan to conduct research at the Ljubljana Historical Archives and the National and University Library. More importantly, I hope to meet the institute’s experts and utilize stimulating intellectual environment at the INZ to further my current research as well as develop foundations for our future cooperation.
Publications:
Peer reviewed
Book reviews
Biography:
I am an environmental social scientist with a passion for understanding the historical and cultural constitution of our contemporary relationship with domestic energy and home heating. I was therefore inspired to learn of an institute linking historical research to contemporary environmental challenges, something I have been striving for most of my career. As such, I have pioneered the application of historical research methods to energy studies, a field which suffers significantly from ‘presentism’, neglecting the historical conditions of our present and future (Mahon, 1992). My research into home heating sits at the confluence of energy poverty, social justice, socio-technical and policy research and my methods borrow from ethnography (visual methods) and history (oral histories). I am interested in the deeply personal nature of home heating transitions and the way they significantly reorganise the way people use energy, triggering deeper transformations of societies, economies and cultures and manifesting these changes at the heart of the home. As we stand on the brink of huge changes to the way we power and heat our homes (towards low carbon, digitalised systems) and come to terms with the social, cultural, political, economic and gender implications of this, my research asks: ‘What is this present of ours? How have we got here and what are the possibilities for a different future?’. I have recently been awarded a multi-million pound grant by the CHANSE programme for a project (JUSTHEAT) gathering oral histories of heating transitions across the UK, Sweden, Romania and Finland and distilling the lessons for the current transition away from fossil fuelled heating. I am keen to link my Visiting Fellowship to this project.
Fellowship, November 2022 and May 2023
My Fellowship will be split across two separate visits, firstly in November 2022 and then again in Spring 2023. During my time a Visiting Fellow, I will focus on the following activities:
Knowledge exchange: In person presentation of my work of relevance to the institute including work on oral histories of heating from the UK, Sweden and AU. A meeting would be held in advance to determine the aspects of my work and methods of most interest to the Institute. A reciprocal presentation from the institute at my institution would be welcomed.
Scoping joint funding collaborations: Identification of complementary interests and scoping of potential joint project ideas and funding sources to target.
Researching heating histories of Slovenia: to extend the JUSTHEAT project into new territory and initiate a social, cultural and political history of a heating system dominated by biomass by researching historic Slovenian heating provision and planned heating transitions via documentary analysis and interviews with experts identified with the support of the Institute.
Exploratory oral histories: gather an initial set of up to 10 oral histories of heating in Ljubljana to explore lived experience of heating and heating transition in the area. This will allow for establishment of an empirical dataset to be built on by me/other scholars and enable demonstration of the method and its applications. Institute staff/ their families would be welcome to participate.
Final presentation: Presentation of key findings and knowledge created and exchanged during the visit, shared priorities identified and agreed next steps.
Post fellowship: a programme of monthly online meetings initially for six months to progress agreed areas for collaboration through funding bids and joint writing projects. Reciprocal visit to the UK for appropriate Institute staff.
Recent publications:
Biography
I lead the Research Group “Entangled Parliamentarisms: Constitutional Practices in Russia, Ukraine, China and Mongolia, 1905–2005,” sponsored by the European Research Council (ERC), at Heidelberg University (Germany). My research interests include history of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, with special attention to Siberia and the Russian Far East, histories of parliaments, empires, and diversity, and global intellectual history. I wrote two monographs – Governing Post-Imperial Siberia and Mongolia, 1911–1924 (London: Routledge, 2016) and The Rise and Fall of Russia’s Far Eastern Republic, 1905–1922 (London: Routledge, 2018). Currently, I work on a monograph devoted to conceptual and institutional history of parliaments in Russia and the Soviet Union between 1905 and 1955. I am also interested in digital humanities, especially historical GIS (geographic information systems).
Visiting Fellowship, November 2022–March 2023
Within the framework of the Research Project “Entangled Parliamentarisms: Constitutional Practices in Russia, Ukraine, China and Mongolia, 1905–2005,” I cooperated with Dr. Jure Gašparič, who contributed a chapter to the volume Parties as Governments in Eurasia, 1913–1991: Nationalism, Socialism, and Development, and Tjaša Konovšek, who participated in one of our conferences. I also participated in three events organized by the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana, including a panel which was organized by Dr. Ana Kladnik. During my stay I want to continue the cooperation with the researchers of the Institute and broaden the scope of my current research of parliaments and constitutions under state socialism. Working together with Dr. Gašparič and Dr. Adéla Gjuričová (Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences), we will compare concepts pertaining to parliaments and parliamentary institutions in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the USSR between the 1960s and 1991. In terms of possible long-term cooperation with the researchers of the Institute, I would like to continue engaging with comparative studies of parliamentarism, federalism, and other concepts under state socialism in a global context. During my stay in Ljubljana, I want to do some preliminary archival and library research on Yugoslavia and learn Slovene. I am also keen to extend my digital-humanities skill set by learning techniques of text mining.
Relevant Publications
I am a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS), University of Oxford. My current research explores political discourses around mobility and migration in post-Yugoslav space, with a particular emphasis on activism and political aspiration. In support of this project, I am carrying out ethnographic fieldwork, primarily in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Through an analysis of the legacies of various regionalist projects, including but not limited to Yugoslavia, I attempt to understand how political organising makes use of historical contexts and integrates constructions of the past into contemporary debates.
I graduated from the University of St Andrews with a PhD in Social Anthropology in 2021. My previous research explored similar thematic material in the context of mobility in North Africa and the Northwestern Sahara.
Visiting Fellowship October-December 2022
My visit to INZ will coincide with ongoing fieldwork in Ljubljana and elsewhere in the region. Alongside primary ethnographic research, I will carry out secondary work at the library of the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (+MSUM). I will also prepare a field report for the European Research Council-funded project on Emptiness, based at COMPAS. The main objectives of my stay in Ljubljana are to 1) collect ethnographic data for my primary research project, and 2) build lasting individual and institutional collaborations with scholars in Slovenia and elsewhere.
More information is available at https://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/people/matthew-porges/. I am also active on Twitter @matthew_porges.
Cody James Inglis (*1993, Phoenix, Arizona) is a Doctoral Candidate in Comparative History at Central European University (Budapest/Vienna). His research interests include the history of political thought in Central and Southeastern Europe between 1848 and 1948—predominantly on the political Left—the history of key socio-political concepts in the region, the history of historiography, and a further methodological interest in relating intellectual and social history more closely to each other. His dissertation, entitled “The Republican Left in Danubian Europe, 1900–1948: A Comparative History of Political Thought,” is a multilingual regional study of left-wing republicanism in the late Habsburg Empire and its successor states from the fin-de-siècle through the post-Second World War reconstruction period. Currently, he is employed as Junior Researcher on the European Research Council Consolidator Grant project “Negotiating post-imperial transitions,” hosted by the Institute of Political History (Politikatörténeti Intézet) in Budapest. There, he is a co-leader of the project’s fourth work package, entitled “Discourses of Transition.”
Visiting Fellowship October-November 2022
At the Institute of Contemporary History, I will undertake a few different tasks, the first of which will be to avail myself of the excellent collections that comprise the INZ Library. While in Ljubljana, I will expand my source research to include holdings at the National and University Library as well as the Archive of the Republic of Slovenia, among others. Second, I will revise and expand an existing article manuscript for publication as well as finish a work-in-progress draft of a research chapter for my dissertation. Indeed, my hope is that a fruitful exchange of ideas and knowledge with my newfound (albeit temporary) colleagues at INZ will generate plenty of inspiration to write. My third task is related to this latter point, namely to engage in consultations with historians and other academics both at INZ and at different institutions around Ljubljana, namely at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ljubljana as well as at the Scientific Research Center of the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts. And finally—of course!—I will use this time to improve my Slovene-language skills.
Biography
Since I started my postgraduate doctoral studies at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science, University of Zagreb, Croatia I have mainly dealt with historically oriented topics. This includes research into the daily lives of members of vulnerable groups, with a focus on the female population with mental disorders.
After defending my doctorate dissertation entitled “Construction of gender identity among female residents in homes for adults with mental illness” in 2017, as a researcher within the European Research Advance Grant project “Post-war transitions in gendered perspective: The case of the North-Eastern Adriatic Coast” (Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana; PI Prof. Dr. Marta Verginella) I considered mostly issues related to girls and women with mental disorders between the two world wars.
In addition, during this period I also discussed some other topics in the field of social micro-history of the Kingdom SCS / Yugoslavia and SFR Yugoslavia. For example, I analyzed the work of women's humanitarian associations, everyday life of war veterans with mental disorders from the First World War, then, dealt with the work of certain psychiatric hospitals and social care institutions that provided care people with mental disorders.
I have been employed at the Institute for Anthropological Research in Zagreb, Croatia since September 2021 where I continue to research and write about the aforementioned social phenomena, but since then my interest in the social history of SFR Yugoslavia grew. In particular, I started research on a war orphans of Second World War and that motivated me to go deeper in the history of childhood in this area. I especially became interested in the life stories of the children of the then female migrant workers.
Visiting Fellowship October 2022
In April 2022, I started collaboration with Dr. Nina Vodopivec from the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana. More precisely, we started in devising a research project concept that will address the issue of women's labor migration in SR Slovenia and SR Croatia. We intend to explore this topic from the perspective of their children and to consider it in relation to the then political and socio-economic conditions and gender stereotypes characteristic of this time and space. I will use the Fellowship opportunity to finish preparing the project documentation with Dr. Vodopivec.
Publications
I am a PhD candidate at the EHESS and doctoral fellow at the CETOBaC (Center for Turkish, Ottoman, Balkan, and Central Asian Studies) in Paris (LabEx TEPSIS Grant 2018-2021). My doctoral thesis focuses on the most massive civil society association in Interwar Yugoslavia, the Sokol physical culture movement. Through an analysis of its transformations (from the second part of the 19th century to WWII) as well as its complex relations with the state, my doctoral investigation aims to develop a larger reflection on the nature and usages of civil mobilization and organization in the Yugoslav space. My research interests are social and cultural history of Southeastern Europe, social movements and voluntary associations, youth and generational relations, as well as visual history. During the academic year 2021-2022, I was a research and teaching assistant (ATER) in History at the University of Languages and Civilizations (INALCO) in Paris, and in 2020 I have been a visiting fellow at the Center for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz (Ernst Mach Grant).
Visiting Fellowship August-September 2022
My stay at INZ (supported by a COST Action Who Cares in Europe? short-Term Scientific Mission Grant) will allow me to work closely with INZ research assistant Isidora Grubački, and to develop further our collaboration started in 2021, at a ASEEES’ panel presentation, and pursued in 2022, at the conference “Biopolitics and Mass Gymnastics in the Modern History of East Central Europe: Continuities and Discontinuities” in CEFRES Prague and the “Fourth Balkan Studies” conference in Marseille. Our cooperation initially developed within the COST Action Who Cares in Europe?’ working group 2: “The mixed economy of welfare”, together with co-leader Fabio Giomi, encompass different collective projects among which: “The associational archive. Rethinking volunteerism through its documentary fabric” and “Rethinking care from Europe's South-eastern periphery”.
My visit at INZ will also provide me with the opportunity to work and discuss with important scholars developing insightful research on associational culture in Central and Eastern Europe, and more broadly on European social history. I will be presenting my work at a INZ seminar and working on consolidate connections between our two research institutions.
I also intend to devote a part of my visit in Ljubljana to archival research at the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia and the National and University Library, but foremost, the Historical Archives of Ljubljana, which hold documents related to the first Sokol institution created among the southern Slavs in 1862, the Sports Museum of Ljubljana and the National Museum of Contemporary History of Slovenia which keep important collections of material (costumes, flags, medals, etc.) and visual documents (photographs and illustrations) that are essential to my investigation.
Personal page and list of publications: http://cetobac.ehess.fr/index.php?2115
I am an intellectual historian researching state socialism, social thought, feminism, and the history of the social sciences and humanities in Eastern Europe, with a focus on Romania. I hold a PhD in Comparative History from Central European University (2019), and have been a visiting professor at Ilia State University, Tbilisi (2019–2020) and fellow at New Europe College, Bucharest (2020–21) and Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena (2021–2022). I was also a junior fellow in the project “Lost in Transition: Social Sciences, Scenarios of Transformation, and Cognitive Dissonances in East Central Europe after 1989,” hosted by Center for Advanced Study Sofia. I am currently a postdoctoral researcher in the project “Philosophy in Socialist Romania. A Case Study in Institutionalized Thought,” hosted by the “Alexandru Dragomir” Institute of Philosophy in Bucharest.
Visiting fellowship August 15–28, 2022
During this short term scientific mission conducted through the COST action “Who cares in Europe?” my work will consist of drafting a research paper that brings together findings from my doctoral research at Central European University on sociological research on quality of life and welfare; and from my postdoctoral research at the “Alexandru Dragomir” Institute of Philosophy on philosophical reflection about notions of “social care” from the point of view of socialist morals. I am especially interested in analyzing how ideas about social care are articulated in the work of women sociologists writing about agricultural labor and the roles of mostly female manual workers in the countryside in the late socialist period; and women philosophers writing in the field of axiology, one of the philosophical branches that was notably “feminized.” Can we speak of “gendered epistemologies” with regard to this work, and if so, how are we to recover the subjectivity of women intellectuals articulating ideas about “social care” from the particular positionality of women’s condition under state socialism? While at the institute, I will be discussing these ideas with members of the political history department in order to articulate them in a broader East Central European comparative context and to think through the continuities between the late socialist and postsocialist periods.
I also plan various networking activities that are meant to strengthen cooperation between my home and host institutes within the framework of the COST action, between WG4 and the network for the Intellectual History of East Central Europe, and to lay the groundwork for future funding applications, notably a Marie Curie individual research and a prospective COST action piloted by the Intellectual History in East Central Europe network.
Publications
I am a doctoral student at the University of Graz and a researcher at the Centre for Southeast European Studies (University of Graz) working on the project “To the Northwest! Intra-Yugoslav Albanian migration (1953-1989)” supported by the Austrian Science fund (FWF) and led by Dr. Rory Archer. Within the framework of the project I am working on a dissertation that deals with the social history of Albanian migrants from Kosovo and Macedonia in socialist Slovenia. Informed by my background in sociology, special focus is given to migrant craftsmen and businessmen and to the question of why Albanian migrants' life trajectories differed from those of other migrants within Yugoslavia. Methodologically, the doctoral research combines archival sources from the municipal level with oral history interviews.
My research interests more broadly are centred on the social and political history of the Socialist Yugoslavia, sociological and anthropological inquiries into the Balkan family structures from a historical perspective, and the conceptions of race and postcolonial theory in the Yugoslav context.
Previously, I worked as a teaching assistant for Sociology at the University of Ljubljana (2019-2020). In January and February 2022, I was a visiting researcher at the University of Leipzig (ARQUS Alliance research grant). Since November 2020, I have been the moderator of the Balkan Academic News mailing list. A contributor since 2016, I am also a regular author of broadcasts at Radio Študent, specialising in topics related to South-Eastern Europe.
Visiting Fellowship June-August 2022
In June 2021, at the invitation of Ana Kladnik, a member of the Institute, Rory Archer and I presented our project on Intra-Yugoslav Albanian migration within the INZ lecture-series “History on the Edge”. Collaboration with Ana Kladnik was further deepened in the context of a shared research interest in Albanian migration to socialist Slovenia. As a visiting fellow at INZ, I am working on my dissertation research. Visiting fellowship at the Institute allows me to conduct archival research at the Ljubljana Historical Archives focusing on documents related to private crafts from the early socialist period (craft licence applications, complaints, inspection reports and the like). Additionally, being a guest at the INZ provides a practical starting point for conducting oral history interviews with Albanian migrants in Ljubljana and in the surrounding area. A welcoming and stimulating academic environment at INZ has so far proven beneficial for the development of my research, and I look forward to further comments and referrals relevant for my topic.
Articles and other research project-related information is accessible on the website: https://tothenorthwest.archerrory.net/
I currently work at the Department of General History at the Faculty of Arts, Comenius University in Bratislava. My research covers civil society, nationalism and intellectual and political history in the late socialist and post-socialist (Czecho-)Slovakia. I have recently cooperated on the project A Game-Changing Year: Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Europe where I focused on both late socialist and post-socialist narratives of remembrance. I was a visiting fellow at the Imre Kertész Kolleg at Friedrich Schiller Universität in Jena. Before, I carried out research internships at the Institute of Contemporary History at the Czech Academy of Sciences, and at the Open Society Archives in Budapest.
The main attempt of my research tackles the intellectual history of the emerging forms of civil society, national politics, neoliberalism and democracy in Slovakia within a broader frame of Czecho-Slovakia and Central Europe respectively.
Visiting Fellowship June-August 2022
My motivation for the research stay at the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana was sparked by a cooperation that has already been carried out at various levels. These include my participation at the conference on European parliamentary history co-organised by the institute’s Jure Gašparić and Tjaša Konovšek in 2020, my research cooperation with two members of the institute, Tjaša Konovšek and Isidora Grubački, and, most recently an international conference and workshop Intellectual History in Transition, hosted by the institute and co-organised by Isidora Grubački and Marko Zajc in 2021. In particular, the most recent cooperation in the field of intellectual history of the post-socialist period has been a major influence on my scholarly ambitions.
It is within this frame where the role of the Ljubljana Institute of Contemporary History has provided me a vital support and introduced me to further possibilities of conducting relevant research applicable in international academic platforms. At the same time, with a vision of both developing and promoting future cooperation, the institute is becoming an international research hub for the study of contemporary history. The main objectives of my stay in Ljubljana aim at further development of my research on post-socialist history of democracy in East Central Europe, in cooperation with Tjaša Konovšek and other colleagues from the institute, as well as establishing a more solid basis for further institutional cooperation.
Relevant publications
IVANČÍK, Matej, From Democrats to Liberals. The Ambiguous Origins of Liberals and Civil Society in Slovakia after 1989. In: Soudobé dějiny, 2021, 28, Vol. 3, pp. 706-724.
IVANČÍK, Matej, “State of Grace”. A Probe into Understanding Democratic Trust and Legitimacy through the Eyes of the Public Against Violence. In: Forum Historiae, 2021, 15, Vol. 2, pp. 123-138.
I am a post-doctoral researcher in linguistics at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. My scientific domain is of an interdisciplinary nature and can best be described as ‘computational sociolinguistics’, which means that I try to bridge the gap between linguistics, sociology, and computer science. I use quantitative and digital methods (including automated feature extraction, statistical modelling, and machine learning) to examine large text corpora.
Both my pre-and postdoctoral work focuses on youth language and online language, e.g. on social media platforms such as WhatsApp or Facebook. While teenagers’ social media writing is easily recognizable (containing emoji, spelling deviations, etc.), this does not imply that the genre is homogeneous, i.e., that all teenagers write in the same style. In my PhD research, I observed systematic patterns of sociolinguistic variation: distinct online writing by different groups of teenagers. Teenagers appear to have significantly different online writing styles (in terms of various linguistic features) depending on their gender identity, age, educational background, and social class. Furthermore, not only the teenagers’ own profiles influence their language use: their conversation partner plays a crucial role too. In my current research, I examine this phenomenon of ‘accommodation’: people adapting their language use to (that of) their conversation partner. Some of the research questions I try to answer are: Do teenagers write differently on social media when interacting with someone of the same versus the opposite sex? Which linguistic features are adapted and which remain stable? And do boys and girls meet each other ‘in the middle’, or is the linguistic adaptation asymmetric?
I first met professor Darja Fišer (INZ and University of Ljubljana) in 2016, at a conference she organized here in Ljubljana. I had just started my PhD then. Ever since we have kept in touch and over the years, we collaborated remotely on multiple occasions. In addition, I was honoured to have Darja as a member of my doctoral jury in 2019. This spring, I am visiting the INZ for six weeks to collaborate with Darja, Nikola Ljubešić (Jožef Stefan Institute and University of Ljubljana) and Bojan Evkoski (Jožef Stefan Institute) in the context of the newly founded research programme Digital Humanities. We are analyzing the CLARIN ParlaMint dataset, which contains parliament transcripts from 17 European countries. As a linguist, I am interested in how politicians speak in parliament. Which people ‘cluster’ linguistically, i.e. are most similar to each other in their language use? Are these the traditional demographic groups (e.g. women vs men, or younger vs older generations)? Or does the political setting overrule classical patterns, and do ‘political’ clusters emerge (e.g. left- vs right-wing politicians)?
I am excited to be working at the INZ and to get a taste of life in Ljubljana. Kind and intelligent co-workers, a beautiful city, and the mountains on the horizon... What an inspiring place!
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I am a PhD candidate at the Department of History at Central European University, Budapest/Vienna, where I am working on my dissertation on the history of department stores in Socialist Yugoslavia. By applying a pan-Yugoslav, transnational, and gender perspective, I am exploring how different expert communities planned the modernization of retail and urban space under Yugoslav self-managed socialism from the late 1950s to the late 1980s. My research interests include urban, expert, labor, women’s and gender, and transnational history of state-socialism in Central and Southeastern Europe. Recently I have been a visiting researcher at the University of Belgrade, Serbia (CEEPUS research grant) and at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw (COST Action WORCK mobility grant).
Visiting Fellowship April-June 2022
During my stay at INZ in the framework of the Erasmus+ Internship Mobility Program, under the guidance of research fellow Dr. Nina Vodopivec I will explore primary and secondary materials on several case-studies relevant for my dissertation. These include (1) the documentation of state-socialist women’s organizations in Slovenia, whose activities in the sphere of home economics set the foundations for the emergence of modern retail systems and spaces in Socialist Yugoslavia in the late 1950s; and (2) the documentation of the Slovenian architect Lidija Podbregar-Vasle, who was one of the main experts in designing and producing expert knowledge on supermarkets and department stores in Yugoslavia the 1950s and 1960s. This research is also part of a cooperation with research assistant Isidora Grubački for a panel presentation at ASEEES 2022 co-organized under the COST Action WORCK working group “Intersecting Marginalities.” At the end of my stay, I will also take part at the Institute's festival History on the Edge with a lecture titled “Women’s Organizations, Home Economics, and the Beginnings of Modern Retail in Socialist Yugoslavia, 1950s-1960s.”
Publications
"Book Review: Gender, Generations, and Communism in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond. Artwińska, Anna, and Mrozik, Agnieszka, eds." East Central Europe 48, 1 (2021): 132-138
"Book Review: Coca-Cola Socialism: Americanization of Yugoslav Culture in the Sixties. By Radina Vučetić. Translated by John K. Cox." Hungarian Historical Review 8, 1 (2019): 251-253
"The Unrealized Department Store "Na-Ma" in Trnje: Ambitions and Challenges in Expanding the Retail Network and Creating the Urban Space in Zagreb in the Early 1960s." Peristil: Scholarly Journal of Art History 61, 1 (2018): 213-227
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