Past Events

We often think of cinema’s politics as matters of subject, style, distribution, or reception. This talk, however, locates film’s politics in its raw materials—in substances like silver, gelatin, and cotton, on which cinema’s play of shadow and light depends. It does so through the case of Nazi Germany, examining the Agfa film company’s embrace of fascist…

We are all familiar with the story of political transformation, serial regime change and the remaking of East Central Europe in 1989, with repercussions far beyond the region. The events of that year saw at once the acceleration of history and the supposed end of it, depending on one's perspective. This seminar seeks to revisit how participants at the time -…

Focusing on the kiosks that rapidly appeared along the Albanian coast in the 1990s and early 2000s, the seminar examines these structures not merely as marginal or temporary architectural objects, but as socially embedded environments.

Imagine a world without corruption. A world in which politicians disregard private interests and are committed to a better future for the people they serve. State socialist political elites in Cold War East-Central Europe promised to build such a world. Now imagine the same elites being caught profiting from their offices, building private homes using state…

This seminar will explore how military leadership in the Habsburg Empire increasingly turned their attention to the legal and administrative regime in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the years before the First World War.

The economic transformation of the Republic of Ireland into a ‘Celtic tiger’ and that of Poland into a market economy are primarily associated with the 1990s. However, recent studies show that these developments already began in the 1980s, so that it is sometimes possible to speak of the “long 1980s” - even if the political changes in East-Central Europe in…

Although they may seem far apart, the social processes of upward mobility and partner selection are in fact very much intertwined. Whereas endogamy is a well-known method of safeguarding the borders of class, marrying into a family of higher social status has always been recognized as an efficient tactic of social climbing for both men and women. Drawing on…

From the very first days of their large-scale attack on Ukraine in February 2022, the Russian invaders have made exceptional efforts to interact with the war memorial landscape of the newly occupied territories. This landscape consists of tens of thousands of monuments, mostly in small towns and villages, commemorating the Second World War and other…

How have ordinary people been affected by, responded to, and made sense of the manifold changes in Eastern Europe over the past three decades? How have dominant narratives of transition obscured everyday experiences of this period and how have people, in turn, challenged these narratives?

The talk will attempt to interpret the evolution of the Polish Jewish elite, with particular emphasis on the elite circles of Warsaw, over the course of the “long 20th century”. The key point of reference for the analysis will be the changing political, cultural, and, above all, economic relations in the Polish lands and the resulting changes in the…

The aim of this seminar is to show how the concept of the civilizing mission – once used in the colonial politics of Western empires – was transferred in various ways to another geographical area, namely in East-Central Europe: both as an intellectual idea and as a tool for legitimizing political power.

Who were the communist women who designed and implemented the socialist project of women’s emancipation not only in Poland, but around the world? How did they conceptualize emancipation?

This seminar will examine how governments, social actors, multilateral institutions, and NGOs worked to bridge the goals of broad regional mobility and deep social protection as free movement was implemented in the 1960s.

The decades following the First World War were a period of political, social, and economic transformation for Central and Eastern Europe. The seminar looks at the role of foreign aid in Romania between 1918 and 1940, as it explores the interrelation between state building and non-governmental humanitarianism in the interwar period.

Flight and migration are part of the dramatic consequences of the escalation of the Russian war against Ukraine. Millions of people have been forced to leave their devastated homes in Ukraine, but hundreds of thousands have also fled their Russian homeland. This presentation will analyze rare survey data on social and political views of Russian migrants in…

Understanding VW's intense focus on China requires delving into the history of its interactions with its largest global market. However, much remains unknown about the perspectives of decision-makers in Wolfsburg and Beijing regarding VW's entry into China.

Highlighting the forgotten stories of Soviet citizens who contributed to the nuts-and-bolts operations and lesser-known activities of world governance, the talk will illustrate the UN’s importance for a group of Soviet "one-worlders," who used the world body to imagine and work for a better world amidst the realities of the Cold War.

This lecture explores how fin-de-siècle beekeepers in the Yugoslav region imagined and attempted to carry out the racial reclamation of their local honeybees. It is ultimately part of a larger labor and environmental history of the post-Ottoman Balkans, which examines how transnational capital and new national states reshaped the relationship between local…

When the Von der Leyen Commission took office in December 2019, the new President, Ursula von der Leyen, pledged to put "Foresight" at the heart of her agenda for Europe. But what is Foresight, where did it come from, and how did it attain such political prominence?

Perestroika and transformation have to be considered as part of larger histories and re-integrated into the arguments and theories developed for late socialism and theories developed for late socialism. The Transformative Seminar is going to be a very first exploration of a new research project: a history of emotions relating to a ‘long’ Perestroika.

Following the outbreak of the Cold War, the Soviet political establishment became fascinated with visions of a universal scientific literacy to promote the progress to Communism. This task shaped the late Soviet city and, in essence, represented a response to one of the most important questions of modernity: how to use the urban environment to produce…

How do states and societies confront the legacies of war and occupation, and what do truth, guilt, and justice mean in that process? The talk examines people’s wartime choices and their aftermath in Belarus, a war-ravaged Soviet republic that was under Nazi occupation during the Second World War.

In this talk, Prof. Sluga's focus is specifically on 20th century texts that address war and peace by women thinkers categorisable as both international and ‘European’, drawing in accessible Russian-language examples.

What does it mean for Ukrainian citizens to choose to speak Ukrainian or Russian? This talk will focus on the impact of the ongoing war on language, and the role of language in the Russo-Ukrainian war.

Churches are often overlooked in the studies of memory. The study faces these imbalances and approaches churches as memory actors which are intensively engaged in the formation of memory culture that significantly contributes to re-shaping and re-negotiating of group identities.

Germany has recently come under criticism for its reluctance to provide arms to Ukraine following the Russian invasion. For more than a century, however, Germany has more traditionally been criticized for its role in the proliferation of small arms trafficking around the world.

Racism against Eastern Europeans reflects the long-standing imperial rivalry between the West and Russia. As such, it has played a part in the genesis and conduct of the current war in Ukraine.

Dr. Judith Kohlenberger analyzes how Ukrainian refugees arriving in Austria and in Poland differ in terms of their sociodemographic background, choice of host country as well as their return and stay intentions. Preliminary evidence suggests a highly self-selective migration from Ukraine to host countries, having implications for labor market integration.

The book project extends from the steel industry's boom years of the early 1970s to the crisis of the late 1970s and 1980s and concludes with the transformation following the end of the Cold War. The talk will focus on the social impact of the steel crisis and specifically address those disadvantaged by structural change and their scope for action.

The lecture will discuss the possibilities of microhistorical research of the changes taking place within the Polish families under the German occupation in the peripheral territories.

The lecture interrogates development schemes between Ghana and the Soviet Union - notably the Ghana Fishing Corporation, the Cotton Textile Factory, and the Soviet Geological Survey Team from 1957-1966. These engagements were supposed to highlight the benefits and opportunities of Soviet-partnership. However, these dreams never fully materialized.

By examining two early legal cases featuring the alleged counterfeiting of Xiangmao Honey Soap, this talk shows how the Chinese language and linguistic practices in Chinese commercial culture often stymied Western manufacturers and import companies’ attempts to pursue and prosecute suspected Chinese copycats.

This seminar explores the assistance that leading American non-governmental organizations (NGOs) provided to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) economic reforms during the 1980s. The talk will look at China-focused NGOs, such as the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, as well as at older philanthropic NGOs like the Ford and Rockefeller…

After the US war in Vietnam, close to 800,000 Vietnamese left the country by boat, survived, and sought refuge throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific. This is the story of what happened in the camps. In Camps raises key questions that remain all too relevant today: Who is a refugee? Who determines this status? And how does it change over time?

In this seminar, Professor Warlouzet will talk about his upcoming book, to be published in January 2022 in French and entitled "Europe vs. Europe. Social, neoliberal and industrial Europe". It deals with the history of European economic and social policies since 1945.

The talk exposes the political dynamic in post-1991 Ukraine through the concept of “performative citizenship” (Isin 2017) that presumes a political struggle claiming for rights rather than a pre-existing institutional design providing them.

Drawn from Natasha Wheatley's book manuscript of the same title, this talk shows how the serial remaking and unmaking of empire in Central Europe placed extraordinary pressure on sovereignty’s two central fictions – its singularity and its immortality.

Masuda Hajimu's "Cold War Crucible" is an inquiry into the peculiar nature of the Cold War. It examines not only centers of policymaking but seeming aftereffects of Cold War politics during the Korean War: suppression of counterrevolutionaries in China, the White Terror in Taiwan, the Red Purge in Japan, and McCarthyism in the United States.

This presentation will address the transnational roots, debates and conditions for the diachronic implementation of a game-changing policy: The EU’s Free Movement of Persons. Its main objective is to highlight the revealing value of critical historical analysis in this field and the normative legacies on human mobility rights in the European integration…

The talk uses the lens of childhood and youth to provide an unconventional diachronic exploration of the relationship between political crises, the longer processes of political and social transformation and their implications for the lives of the young.

It is a common assumption that Russia's turbulent transition to a market economy was inspired, or even imposed, by Western advisors. But the ideas behind Russia's economic transformation were not an alien concept imported from the West in the 1990s.

How have people been learning, practicing and knowing sexuality, gender roles and gender awareness before and after 1989? What imprint did the social and political transformations leave on historical legacies, actors and structures of sexual education?

For decades, deindustrialization has been inflicting collateral damage far beyond displaced manufacturing workers, by affecting the lives of working-class families and driving formerly industrialized areas into deprivation.

Governments in East Central Europe have long relied on radical neoliberal reforms as a strategy to leave socialism behind and become members of the European Union. However, since the Great Financial Crisis, neoliberalism has become politicized, and some governments - most notably Hungary and Poland - have started to experiment with more statist and…

If we want to understand the cultural forms and conceptual repertoire behind today’s culture wars in East Central Europe, we need to dig before 1989. With the help of the concept of ‘narratives of democracy,’ this talk by Dr. Michal Kopeček will go beyond the liberal vs. populist scheme prevailing today and offer a more nuanced reading.

The hiSTORY of transformation from state socialism contains multiple STORIES - among them many “His- and Her-Stories” which imply different ways of experiencing and coping with sociopolitical changes related to sexuality and gender. Drawing on her research on Czech Normalization, Libora Oates-Indruchová (Graz) asks how focussing on herstories of…

Magda Szcześniak (Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw) explores queer counterpublics of the late 1980s and 1990s in Poland and the question of visibility of non-normative sexualities in the framework of RECET's series "His- and Her-Stories of Transformation".

Prof. Dr. Bela Tomka (University of Szeged) will present and discuss his book "Austerities and Aspirations: A Comparative History of Growth, Consumption, and Quality of Life in East Central Europe since 1945" (CEU Press, 2020).