Date: September 15-16, 2025
Location: Berlin
Languages: English & French
Organizers
Centre d’études historiques de l’Académie polonaise des Sciences (CBH-PAN)
ISP (UMR 7220)
LincS (UMR 7069)
Université de Toulon
Université de Łódź
French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences – Prague
La « mémoire » comme objet d’études, objet politique, social et médiatique envahit le débat public à partir de la fin des années 80 en Europe. « Devoir de mémoire », « lieux de mémoire », « guerres de mémoires », « concurrence des victimes », « envahissement mémoriel », « chemins de la mémoire », « politique de la mémoire », « défense de la mémoire », « assassins de la mémoire » : autant d’expressions qui traduisent un nouveau rapport au monde, un nouveau régime d’historicité que François Hartog appelle présentisme. Cette nouvelle configuration du rapport au passé se traduit par des revendications identitaires variées notamment de la part de groupes jusqu’alors dominés mais aussi par des pratiques institutionnelles nouvelles. La mémoire devient ouvertement un outil mobilisateur et d’intervention médiatique, public, politique au sens large du terme, mais également littéraire et artistique. Elle nourrit une réflexion épistémologique au sein de la communauté des sciences humaines et sociales.
En effet, de nombreux travaux se sont attachés à analyser le « moment-mémoire » en sociologie, science politique, histoire, critique littéraire et en études culturelles. Pour autant, peu de recherches et d’événements scientifiques croisent, ensemble, différents points de vue disciplinaires. Le but de ce colloque est de le réexaminer à la lumière des travaux récents et inédits des phénomènes de mise en visibilité des mémoires au regard de la conflictualité et de l’antagonisme. L’objectif est par conséquent de souligner les convergences, existant entre différentes approches en sciences humaines et sociales et, partant, d’entamer une réflexion commune sur les méthodologies et les théories qui soutiennent aujourd’hui les memory studies, y compris dans leurs dimensions de pratiques effectives de recherche. Le caractère innovant réside également dans le retournement de la perspective à ne plus considérer les mémoires divergentes comme seulement conflictuelles mais également porteuses de potentialités pour des élaborations nouvelles de narrations, récits et pratiques sociales.
Program
Continue reading Memory, Narrative, and Conflict: At the Confluence of Perspectives →
10th session of CEFRES in-house seminar
Through the presentation of works in progress, CEFRES’s Seminar aims at raising and discussing issues about methods, approaches or concepts, in a multidisciplinary spirit, allowing everyone to confront her or his own perspectives with the research presented.
Location: CEFRES Library and online (to get the link, write to cefres[@]cefres.cz)
Date: Tuesday, June 10, 2025 at 4:30 pm
Language: English
Speaker: Honorata Sroka (CEFRES / Charles University)
Chair: Hélène Martinelli (CEFRES / École Normale Supérieure de Lyon)
Text to be read: Peter Bürger (1974). Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translation Michael Shaw. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Abstract
The presentation will take the form of very preliminary remarks related to my post-doctoral research, which I have been conducting for 7 months at the French Research Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences. My project develops the same line of research as my doctoral thesis, however, approaches the issue in a broader way. Specifically, using selected examples of neo-avant-gardes in Central and Eastern Europe, I hope to show how and why artists decided to create subversive forms of historiography and what kind of experimental strategies can be found in archives. Employing the methodology so-called “cultural history of the avant-gardes”, I will reflect on vanguard institutions and practices oriented towards a self-historiography. What I dare to claim one can essentially call a discussion on Peter Bürger’s pivotal book Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974). He was the one who argued that the avant-gardes stood against institutions. In contrast to his assumption, my research aims to display how neo-avant-gardes in Central and Eastern Europe developed rather than destroyed art institutions, as well as subversive forms of historiography, and why these two were intertwined.
Please find the complete program of 2024–2025 seminar here.
Polish Communities in France and in the United States after WW2 and their Political Practices
9th session of CEFRES in-house seminar
Through the presentation of works in progress, CEFRES’s Seminar aims at raising and discussing issues about methods, approaches or concepts, in a multidisciplinary spirit, allowing everyone to confront her or his own perspectives with the research presented.
Location: CEFRES Library and online (to get the link, write to cefres[@]cefres.cz)
Date: Tuesday, May 27, 2025 at 4:30 pm
Language: English
Speaker: Florence Vychytil-Baudoux (EHESS / CEFRES)
Chair: Françoise MAYER
Text to be read: Michael Werner & Bénédicte Zimmermann, « Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity », History and Theory, 2006, vol. 45, no 1, p. 30‑50.
Abstract:
Between the 1880s and the 1930s, over 12 million people left Polish territories “za chlebem” (for bread). While before WW1 the United States attracted most Polish peasants looking for a better future, it was France that became the main destination for Polish migrants in the interwar period. Continue reading Transatlantic Crossings | CANCELLED →
Eighth session of the 2024-2025 CEFRES Francophone
Interdisciplinary Seminar The Map and the Border
In 2023 we started questionning the very act of bordering and representing (a territory, a period, a trajectory). In short, thanks to the interdisciplinarity of our respective disciplines, we began inquiring into the question of the map and the border.
Location: CEFRES, Na Florenci 3, Prague 1
Date: Friday May 23, 2025, from 10 am
Language: French
Speaker: Gilles LEPESANT (CEFRES / CNRS)
Discussant: Barbora Kvasničková (Research fellow at AMO – Association for International Affairs)
Abstract Continue reading Energy and its Renewed Cartography →
Seventh session of the 2024-2025 CEFRES Francophone
Interdisciplinary Seminar The Map and the Border
In 2023 we started questionning the very act of bordering and representing (a territory, a period, a trajectory). In short, thanks to the interdisciplinarity of our respective disciplines, we began inquiring into the question of the map and the border.
Location: CEFRES, Na Florenci 3, Prague 1
Date: Friday April 25, 2025, from 10 am
Language: French
Speaker: Silvestr TRNOVEC (Institute of Oriental Studies, Slovak Academy of Sciences)
Discussant: Jakub ŠTOFÁNIK (Masaryk Institute and Archives, Czech Academy of Sciences)
Abstract Continue reading (Czecho)slovak History and French Colonial Space in Africa →
8th session of CEFRES in-house seminar
Through the presentation of works in progress, CEFRES’s Seminar aims at raising and discussing issues about methods, approaches or concepts, in a multidisciplinary spirit, allowing everyone to confront her or his own perspectives with the research presented.
Location: CEFRES Library and online (to get the link, write to cefres[@]cefres.cz)
Date: Tuesday, April 15, 2025 at 4:30 pm
Language: English
Jan MUSIL (Faculty of Arts, Charles University / associated at CEFRES)
Chair: Hélène Martinelli (CEFRES / École Normale Supérieure de Lyon)
Text to be read: Gorer, Geoffrey. “The Pornography of Death.” Encounter., vol. 5, no. 4, 1955.
Abstract:
With the christian idea of afterlife gradually fading away, 20th century rediscovered death as a real possibility and ultimate termination of individual life, only to make it into an insufferable, abjected topic and a taboo that is, as Geoffrey Gorer provocatively suggests in 1955, only accessible to the Western culture in hypertrophied genres of literature and film that he calls collectively the pornography of death. Continue reading Thanatographies. Staging Grief and Literary Afterlife →
