Keynote speakers

STEFAN BERGER

  • Photo of Prof. Stefan Berger

    Stefan Berger is Professor of Social History and Director of the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr-Universität Bochum and Executive Chair of the Foundation History of the Ruhr in Bochum. He is also an Honorary Professor at Cardiff University in the UK. He has worked extensively on comparative labour history, the history of social movements, nationalism, empires, history of historiography, historical theory, memory studies, and British-German relations in historical perspective. Among his many publications are History and Identity. How Historical Theory Shapes Historical Practice, Cambridge University Press 2022, and Nationalizing Empires (together with Alexei Miller), Central European University Press, 2015.

Keynote lecture: Borderlands of Nineteenth Century European Contiguous Empires in Comparative Perspective

The paper focuses on three nineteenth-century contiguous empires: Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary. Berger discusses the role of borderlands for those empires: which parts of the empire were defined as borderlands and what importance was attached to them from the centre. He will also analyse the borderland perspective by asking how the borderlands saw themselves in the course of the long nineteenth century and how they defined their position vis-à-vis the imperial centre. Here, the role of nationalism played an important part. Given the length of the time period under consideration the paper will also differentiate between different time zones in the development of centre-periphery relations of the three empires under discussion.

DIANA MISHKOVA

  • Diana Mishkova is a specialist in the study of conceptual history and the history of the construction of regions and boundaries. She is a Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and Doctor Honoris Causa of Södertörn University, Sweden. Her latest books include ‘Rival Byzantiums: Empire and Identity in Southeastern Europe’ (Cambridge UP 2022) and the co-edited ‘European Regions and Boundaries. A Conceptual History’ (Berghahn 2017).

Keynote lecture: A symbolic borderland: ‘expert knowledge’ and the conceptualizations of the Balkans in late-eighteenth to early-twentieth century Russia

The paper will discuss imperial Russia’s views of the Balkans, the Balkan Slavs in particular, as informed and buttressed by ‘expert (scientific) knowledge’ and in the context of debates on Russia’s national and imperial identity, historical consciousness, and cultural and political space.