According to the dominant understanding, the nation is a product of modernity (the Industrial Revolution, capitalism, linguistic unification, printing press generalization and the democratization of schooling, etc.). However, nations did not appear ex nihilo in the 18th century. Traditional attempts to explain this emergence do not satisfy scholars, as they focus only on the moment when the nation became the hegemonic mode of political organization during the 19th century. In doing so, they fail to describe the long process that led to this hegemony. This conference will reassess the definition and genealogy of the nation.

Date: May 3rd, 4th and 5th 2023
Location: Central European University (CEU) Campus (Vienna) & online : https://bit.ly/3TRxGjT
Organizer:  Medieval Studies Department of the Central European University
Funding/co-organizers: ACRO (CEU), IMAFO (Austrian Academy of Sciences), FPPCHA (Lausanne), CRHiDI (Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles), CEFRES (Prague) and Stadt Wien Kultur.
Language: English

Continue reading Community, Identity, Individuals: Shaping the (Political) Nation in Premodern Europe →

This roundtable discussion takes place within a conference organized by the Prague Forum for Romani Histories.

Today, many people have become resigned to the fact that xenophobia is a central feature of the transatlantic political landscape. From the United States to France to Eastern Europe, political movements centered on the rejection of “the other” (immigrants; racial and sexual minorities, and so-called “internal enemies”) have garnered mass followings and have entered governments that were until recently seen as immune to the sorts of populism that marked the first half of the twentieth century. The roundtable will sum up a conference organized by the Prague Forum for Romani Histories (18-19 May, Villa Lanna) where participants will discuss politicized xenophobia in the past and today. How, we ask, did past xenophobic movements speak to each other across the Atlantic in the past centuries? How have European and American xenophobia and racism in the past informed movements today? What was and is the role of historical memory in the politics of xenophobia? What are the benefits and risks of drawing parallels between the past xenophobic movements and present ones?

Date: Friday 19th of May 2023, 5:00 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.
Location: CEFRES Library
Organizers: the Prague Forum for Romani Histories (at the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences) in partnership with University of Alabama at Birmingham and Romani Studies Program at the CEU in Vienna
Language: English
Convenors: Jonathan Wiesen (University of Alabama at Birmingham), Angéla Kóczé (Romani Studies Program at the Central European University in Vienna), Kateřina Čapková (Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences).
Chair: Angéla Kóczé
Speakers: Ann Ostendor, Jonathan Wiesen and Vita Zalar

18 May

1:30 p.m. WELCOME

1:45 – 3:15 p.m.  KEYNOTE SESSION
Chair: Kateřina Čapková
Angéla Kóczé: Anti-Roma Racism as a Socio-Historical Consensus: 2008–2009 Neo-Nazi Murders of Roma in Hungary
Jonathan Wiesen: US Racial Violence in the German Imaginary

Break: 3:15 –3:45 p.m.

3:45-5:30 p.m. PANEL I: Transnational Xenophobia
Chair: Jonathan Wiesen
Ann Ostendorf: Anti-Romani Political Racism in the Nineteenth Century United States
Tayla Myree: Remembrance to Reparations: A Study of the Strategies towards the Recognition of Atrocities by Roma and African Americans
Tina Magazzini: Racism or Xenophobia? Tracing the Category-making of Racialized Minorities across the Atlantic and their Consequences

Dinner: 6:00 p.m.

19 May

9:00 – 11:15 a.m. PANEL II: The Holocaust and Holocaust Memory
Chair: Helena Sadílková
Christopher Molnar: Holocaust Memory, Racism, and the Roma Refugee Panic in Reunified Germany
Cristina Teodora Stoica: The Politics of Antiziganim and its shaping of Romania’s Holocaust Historical Memory
Mariana Sabino Salazar: The Politics of Memory: Romanies in Mexican and Brazilian Holocaust Museums
Justyna Matkowska: Pogroms on Roma and Sinti in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II

Break: 11:15-11:45 a.m.

11:45 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. PANEL III: Discrimination and its Legacies
Chair: Martin Fottta
Sunnie Rucker-Chang:The Enduring Impact of School Segregation in the United States and Europe
Michelle Kahn: USA From Nebraska to Berlin, Zagreb, and Beyond: How American Neo-Nazis Shaped the European Far-Right (1970s-1990s)
Dezso Mate: Roma LGBTI Movement – The Politics of Alliance

5:00-6:30 p.m. – Roundtable Discussion hosted by CEFRES, Na Florenci 3
The Politicization of Xenophobia in Transatlantic Contexts
Chair: Angéla Kóczé
Speakers: Ann Ostendor, Jonathan Wiesen and Vita Zalar

See the website of the conference.

The scientific workshop “War in Ukraine and exile” will bring together European researchers to present the preliminary results of their interviews and observations conducted after 24 February 2022 among exiles from three countries: Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. The presentations of papers will address the following themes: trajectories of exiles (mobilised networks, successive displacements), exile experiences (emotions, intimacy), forms of politicisation (ordinary and institutional), interactions between different exiled communities, relations between exiles and host societies/states, relations with relatives left at home, representations and imaginaries associated with the war and its consequences. The workshop is organised in the framework of the BIELEXIL research project. The latter is financed by the flash grant dedicated to Ukraine from the French Collaborative Institute on Migration (Institut Convergences Migrations, ICM).

Continue reading War in Ukraine and exile →

Date and location: March 23–25, 2023, Prague and online
Organizers: Charles University, Faculty of Arts, Department of Czech Literature and Comparative Studies & Department of Romance Studies; with the collaboration of CEFRES
Languages: French and English

Read and download the list of participants and abstracts of their presentation on the FF UK website here.

See the program here.

Text of the call for papers:

Although well explored, Marcel Proust’s literary work is a territory that never ceases to reveal unknown corners. Whether the subject of interest is the author’s masterpiece or his other literary attempts, or even his unpublished writings, research continues to bring out new discoveries. The century that has passed since the author’s death has been marked by efforts to understand his work, or at least to multiply its readings with different interpretative languages.

In Search of Lost Time represents a field of possibilities that – by its essentially open nature – brings to light new answers to old questions: is the aim of the work to satisfy the author’s desire to record his entire life; to overcome death through the power of language, or to express the essence of things? Is it a monumental act of free and involuntary recollection? Or a vast meditation on so many social issues? Continue reading Proustian Perspectives →

Displacements: Women’s Transnational Trajectories & Artistic Experiences of Emancipation in Central Europe

International conference

Convenors: Mateusz Chmurski, Clara Royer, Lola Sinoimeri
Time and Place: March 16-17, 2023 – CEFRES and online
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85661902411?pwd=M3FUZmR0OUhIUWF0ZDFYVzBKa2QvZz09
Meeting ID: 856 6190 2411
Passcode: 456173
Languages of the conference: French & English

Scientific Committee:
Anna Borgos (Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities), Libuše Heczková (Univerzita Karlova), Luba Jurgenson (Sorbonne Université), Iwona Kurz (Uniwersytet Warszawski), Jasmina Lukić (Central European University), Markéta Theinhardt (Sorbonne Université)

Partners: EUR’ORBEM (CNRS-Sorbonne University), CEFRES (CNRS-MEAE), Departement of Czech and comparative literature, Charles University (ÚČLK FF UK), Institute of Polish Culture, Warsaw university (IKP WP UW) – with the support of the European University Alliance 4EU+, the GDR “Connaissance de l’Europe médiane” (CNRS) and the French Institute in Prague

Read the thesis of the conference here.

Continue reading Displacements: Women’s Transnational Trajectories & Artistic Experiences of Emancipation in Central Europe →

Samuel Beckett in Central Europe. Stagings and reception beyond censorship

Researchers working on Beckett or on theatre in Central Europe are invited to meet in April  at the CEFRES and at Charles University. The aim will be to examine the political and aesthetic, and sometimes legal and social, issues that certain dramatic texts may embody, taking Beckett’s theatre as a case study. 

Date: Thursday 20th and Friday 21st April 2023
Location: CEFRES library and Charles University
Organizers: CEFRES in partnership with Sorbonne University, Paris, Bordeaux University and Charles University
Language: English
Convenors: Alice Clabaut, Charles Guillorit
Deadline for sending propositions: 31st January 2023

A summary of the conference and the call for papers is available here.

Program:

Thursday 20 April 2023
at CEFRES Library (Na Florenci 3 Prague 1)
16h- Opening Talk – Octavian Siu [online]
16h30 – Panel 1 : poetics of politics in the work of Samuel Beckett
Vanesa Cotroneo : Breaking the Iron Curtain: Media and Technology in Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe (1982) and Nacht und Träume (1982)
Luciana Peycere : A post-pandemic operatic adaptation of Film (1965): the political and aesthetic potential of performing Beckett at a fringe venue in London.
[break]
17h30 – Roundtable: Staging Beckett today – testimonies of contemporaries stage directors (1h30)
Jan Bosse & Olena Zavhorodnya

Friday 21st April
at Charles University (Faculty of Arts, Room P104, nám. J. Palacha 1/2)
9h30- Welcoming coffees
10h – Keynote Speaker – Marek Kedzierski – Beckett in Perspectives. Discussing with Beckett, staging Beckett, reflecting upon Beckett
[break]
11h 15 – Panel 2: Overview of Beckett reception and stagings in Central Europe
Matthieu Protin – Samuel Beckett Stage Director of his own Theater in Germany: Influence and Consequence.
Tomasz Wiśniewski – “Beckett on the Baltic” and other research experiments in Gdańsk
Anita Rákóczy – A Director’s Apology – Beckett in Hungaria
[lunch break]
14h30 – Panel 2 bis: Overview of Beckett reception and stagings in Central Europe
Miloš Mistrík – Godot has finally come – to Slovakia
Martin Pšenička – Post-1989 stage productions of Beckett in the Czech Republic: a focus on Jan Nebeský’s 1996 production of Endgame
[break]
15h45 – Panel 3 : The question of censorship in and of Beckett’s theatre: a legal or a personal issue?
Alexander Hartley – Beckett’s Legal Scuffles and the Interpretation of the Plays [online]
Matthew Rimmer – The Legal Endgame of Samuel Beckett [online]
Concluding remarks – Alice Clabaut & Charles Guillorit

See more at the conference’s website.