This CENTRAL Workshop is a trilateral cooperation between the University of Vienna, Charles University Prague and ELTE Budapest. 

Venue: ELTE Budapest, Hungary

Humans are in constant motion, and so are things and ideas. These three trilateral workshops in Vienna and Prague will bring together junior and senior scholars working on human movement & migration and on the circulation of goods and ideas to explore the development of new transnational perspectives on the history of Central and Eastern Europe in its global context. They will link up and deepen existing collaborations between the partners on topics of connections and movement in the socialist world and on trade during the Cold War, tying them in with new formats of doctoral education at the University of Vienna.

The workshops bring together different scholars working on the issue of mobility in a broad sense of the term: mobility of people, goods, and ideas. They connect to a broader trend in recent transnational and global historiography, which seeks to connect different strands of research on cross-border movements and connections of human and non-human actors and agents. The workshops thereby also explicitly build on two previous workshops hosted at RECET, which dealt with mobilities and connections in the socialist world (2022) and with commodities, trade, and materiality during the Cold War (2023), combining perspectives on movement with those on materiality. The geographic focus will mainly be on Central and Eastern Europe, embedded in global and comparative contexts.

The core teams of researchers from the three partner universities will include five PhD students in total. They will present their ongoing research in the workshops alongside more senior scholars, who will offer their comments and advice. In addition to the core teams of this application who will travel to both workshops, we will involve other scholars from our respective institutions to participate on-site (without need for funding), both as paper-givers and to act as chairs and commentators. At the University of Vienna, this will allow us close integration of the workshop with the Doctoral School for Historical and Cultural Studies (DSHCS), the new FWF doc.funds project "The Dynamics of Change and the Logics of Transformation", and the Migration Reading Group (a RECET research group funded by the dean's office). At Charles University, we will draw on further scholars from Institute of International Studies and especially the Ukraine in A Changing Europe Research Centre.

---

Workshop program 

Monday, 24 November 2025

10:00 – 11:30: Displacement and Knowledge Circulation

• Joséphine Brive (University of Bordeaux / Charles University): Mapping the circulation of Ukraine-related knowledge between Ukraine, Czech Republic and France since February 2022: actors, institutions and obstacles 
• Sofia Nyblom (Charles University): Ukrainian nomad artists in the EU: a humanitarian mission or a security enactment?
• Natalia Dziadyk (IWM-IMS Fellow, Charles University/CEU): Decolonizing Knowledge on War-Driven Displacement: The Russo-Ukrainian War and Migration Studies

Chair: Jannis Panagiotidis (RECET)

13:30 – 15:00: Economic Connectivity and Mobility in Cold War Eastern Europe

• Daria Tashkinova (RECET): “‘On Personal Grounds’: Interrepublican Mobility and the Soviet post-Graduate Job Assignment System in 1960s Latvia.”

• Martin Gumiela (RECET): "Outposts of Foreign Trade? People's Poland's Corporate Equity Investments in Austria During the Cold War"

• Zsombor Bódy (ELTE TáTK): “Where Do the Cows Travel to? Hungarian Cynicism in the Space of East-West Economic Relations in the 1960s and 1970s”

• Katalin Baráth (University of Szeged): "From Havana with Love? Hungarian Scientists in Cuba, 1963-1980"

Chair: Márkus Keller (ELTE TáTK)

15:15 – 17:00: Rural Transformations and Social Movements: Gender, Health, and Environment

• Ana Kozelnik (RECET): "Ideas on Women and Gender Inequality in Slovenia: Case Study of 'Women at Work' (1975)"

• Jannis Panagiotidis (RECET): "Healthcare and Migration: The Hospital as a Site of Rural Transformation"

• Laura Plochberger (RECET): "Campaigning for Rural Workers in the Heart of Vienna: George Grigorovici and the Crisis of Bucovinian Wood Businesses in 1911."

• Márton Simonkay (University of Szeged): "Green Way to the West: International Relations of Hungarian Environmental Movements in the 1980s” 

Chair: Kinga Alina Langowska (Charles University)

Tuesday, 25 November 2025

10:00 – 11:45: Tracing Memory, Exile, and Identity in 20th Century Europe

• Jose Francisco Espejo Jimenez (Charles University): "Dealing with the guilt: Autobiographical narrative in Spanish and Romanian History textbooks."
• Kinga Alina Langowska (Charles University): “Salvador de Madariaga (1886–1978): The Life and Work of a Spanish Exile for a Free Europe."
• Alexander Schneidmesser (RECET): “(Almost) 55 Years Later: Transgenerational Bukharan Jewish Life in Contemporary Vienna.”
• Gergely Magos (ELTE TáTK): "Masculinity and Mental Disorders. Male Neurosis in Hungarian Medical Discourse and Practice"

Chair: Zsuzsi Kiss (ELTE TáTK)