Lecture format: on site
Venue: Institute for Contemporary History
Street address: Spitalgasse 2, Campus, entrance Hof 1.13., seminar room 1, 1090 Vienna 

The event will be moderated by Jannis Panagiotidis (RECET).

During the long nineteenth century, the transformation of Ottoman and Habsburg imperial rule made Southeastern Europe a crucial arena for debating the relationship between political freedom and national emancipation. These debates were never confined to the region itself. They were shaped by western imperial interests and by Anglo-British conceptions of liberalism as well as by the claims of local political actors. What forms of liberty could be imagined within an empire, and when did freedom come to be identified with national sovereignty? How did the national question expand certain possibilities for emancipation while restricting others? Drawing on some of the figures and encounters reconstructed in The Interpreters: British Internationalism and Empire in Southeastern Europe 1870-1930 (Manchester University Press, 2025) the talk explores the translation of political ideas across national and imperial boundaries. It places these histories within a broader discussion of how the meaning, and the limits, of political freedom were negotiated as imperial structures were challenged and new national orders emerged.

Georgios Giannakopoulos is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Modern History at City St George's, University of London. His research explores the entangled histories of empire, nationalism and international order in Britain and Southeastern Europe from the nineteenth century onward. He is the author of The Interpreters: British Internationalism and Empire in Southeastern Europe, 1870–1930 (Manchester University Press, 2025) and co-editor of The War for Anatolia and the Remaking of International Order (Bloomsbury, 2025). He is currently writing a history of international interventions in Modern Greece for Princeton University Press.

Jannis Panagiotidis is Scientific Director of the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna. His research focuses on the history of anti-East European racism, on East-West migration during the Cold War, on post-Soviet migration, and on the history of free movement. He has also published on the global history of ethnic Germans from the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.