This workshop presents innovative historical interpretations on twentieth-century European history by pushing the boundaries of geographical fields and the conventions of disciplinary methods. Spanning studies of displacement, emigration, and transnational solidarities; explorations of space, memory, trauma, and identity; and analyses of protest, activism, and human agency, the contributions add to existing scholarship on political transitions, political violence, mobility, survival, resilience, and remembrance. Methodologically, the papers engage with transnational archival research, narrative nonfiction techniques, oral history interviews, visual analysis, and participant observation to excavate and present both the histories of the old continent and the stories of its inhabitants. Based on the pre-circulation and discussion of unpublished work-in-progress, the workshop provides a forum to enrich our knowledge of Eastern European history, broadly defined, and facilitates the future publication of cutting-edge scholarly articles and books.
Organizer: Theodora Dragostinova, Department of History
Participants:
The Ties that Bind Us
Lilia Topouzova
University of Toronto
Healing on the Frontlines: Polish-Jewish Women Doctors in the Spanish Civil War
Anna Muller
University of Michigan-Dearborn
Expired Visas for San Domingo: Time as Determinant in Postwar Jewish Emigration
Rebekah Klein-Pejšová
Purdue University
‘Returning Jews to Jewish Spaces’: Reconsecrating European Synagogues after the Holocaust
Robin Judd
The Ohio State University
Contesting the End of History: Protest and Everyday Life in Poland, 1988-1993
Malgorzata Fidelis
University of Illinois at Chicago
“Like My Own”: Adopting Refugee Children after the Great War
Theodora Dragostinova
The Ohio State University
This workshop is funded by the Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies through a Title VI National Resource Center Grant from the U.S. Department of Education. Other support comes from the Department of History, the Paissiy Fund in Bulgarian Studies, and the Melton Center for Jewish Studies.
The workshop is by invitation only. Interested students and faculty should reach out to dragostinova.1@osu.edu for additional information.