Thursday, December 24, 2015

YIVO has extended the deadline for its 2016-2017 fellowships



YIVO’s annual fellowships in Eastern European and American Jewish History are now open for application. More information and the online application form can be found here: https://yivo.org/List-of-Fellowships

Each year, YIVO awards a series of Max Weinreich Center Research Fellowships for scholarly research in YIVO’s library and archival collections. These fellowships are intended primarily, but not exclusively, for graduate students and emerging scholars. Each fellowship requires a public lecture by the holder, to be held during or immediately after the fellow’s research period. Fellows are usually expected to spend
a period of four to six weeks in residence. This can be divided into several research trips, in consultation with YIVO staff.

The Fellowship Application will require the following information in pdf format: 1) Cover Letter 2) CV 3) 2-page project proposal, stating specifically which YIVO holdings are most relevant to the applicant’s project. 4) Two letters of recommendation.

Announcements regarding awards for the academic year beginning September 2016 will be made in February 2016. The deadline for applications is January 15, 2016.

For more information, please contact:
Eddy Portnoy
Max Weinreich Center Academic Advisor and Research Associate
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

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Thursday, December 17, 2015

CfP: “Urban Peripheries?” Emerging Cities in Europe’s South and East, 1850-1945



“Science and the city” has become a trending topic in recent historiography, both in history of science, technology and medicine (STM) as well as in Urban Studies. So far there has been a strong focus on the metropolis and their multifaceted scientific culture. Yet what about “peripheral cities” in Eastern and Southern Europe? Are they only smaller copies of London, Paris and Berlin? What is to be gained from studying the scientific culture of “non-metropolitan” cities? So far these cities have been described as being on the receiving end. Knowledge in STM, blue prints for scientific institutions, urban models and other practices were created and tested in the metropolis and then passed on. This postulates a transfer from the center to the periphery and hence a clear epistemological hierarchy.


The double workshop, organised in Germany by the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe (Germany) and in Spain by the Institució Milà i Fontanals (CSIC), and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, would like to question this assumption. Our methodological point of departure is that cities in Southern and Eastern Europe (our specific geographic focus) were part of an “inter-urban matrix” (N. Wood). Through the daily press, but also through other channels such as scholarly networks and professional contacts people were quite conscious of what was happening elsewhere in Europe. There are virtually no studies on the connections between peripheral cities, the exchange of knowledge and expertise and the formation of networks and collaborations. This workshop intends to open new perspectives on the exchanges in the areas of science, technology, medicine and urban planning between “urban peripheries” such as Athens, Barcelona, Budapest, Lemberg, Lisbon or Tallinn? In what follows we sketch three possible research agendas:


Nationalism

As highly multiethnic and multireligious contact and cultural transfer zones, the East European and Southern Borderlands are located on the peripheries of the Empires, between Germany and Austria-Hungary, Russia, Great Britain and the Ottomans. In these borderlands, the imposing of homogenizing structures by the Empires before World War I and the emerging local nationalisms generated a dynamic in the urbanization and modernization processes. This workshop will focus on the assumed specificities of the urbanization in the South and East of Europe which is characterised by different forms and modes of knowledge transfer.

Comparing modernities

The inhabitants of allegedly “peripheral” of “backward” cities felt that they had to “catch up” with London and Paris (or less frequently with Berlin and Vienna). This “yearning for metropolitanism” (J. Morrell) was both a rhetorical exercise and a practical struggle. Many of these “peripheral” cities tried to present themselves as “progressive”, that is to say as promoting science, technology, medicine (hygiene) and rational city planning. Yet the meaning of modernity was highly context-dependent and historically contingent. The challenge of the comparative research agenda of the workshop lies in teasing out the differences between these modernities.

“Best practices”

Peripheral – or emerging – cities understood that the experience of similar cities was much more helpful in solving their concrete problems than much of the metropolitan model. Therefore this workshop will try to reconstruct the mechanisms and strategies behind of choosing certain “best practices”, i.e. urban models that serve smaller cities. Therefore special attention might be paid to fields such as urban planning, sewage systems and infrastructure of supply, which played a crucial role in the modernisation of many “peripheral” cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This search for practical models will thus help to elucidate the networks between these urban spaces.

This workshop will try and unveil the directions and channels through which knowledge was created and disseminated in these interurban networks. Conferences, research trips, lectures, private visits and correspondence would have to be investigated. The aim would be to render these transnational communities visible again, not least by bringing their practices and networks back to a tangible space: the city. To enable a thorough discussion we plan a double workshop (ca. one and half days long). Precirculated papers will be presented at the first workshop and revised versions of these papers at the second workshop. In the end we plan to publish these papers as a book a special issue of a journal. The first workshop will take place on 26-27 September 2016 at the Institució Milà i Fontanals in Barcelona (Spain), the second part at the Herder Institute in Marburg (Germany) in March 2017. The organisers will cover travel and accommodation costs of the invited speakers.


Please submit your proposal of ca. 250 words and a short CV as well as contact details by February 15, 2016 to: forum@herder-institut.de


ORGANISERS

Heidi Hein-Kircher/Eszter Gantner: Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe – Institute of the Leibniz Association
Oliver Hochadel: Institució Milà i Fontanals – Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científi cas
Agustí Nieto-Galan: Centre d’Història de la Ciència (Cehic), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
VENUE/DATE

26-27 September 2016 • Institució Milà i Fontanals, Barcelona, Spain (first part)

March 2017 • Herder Institute or Historical Research on East Central Europe, Marburg, Germany (second part)


 http://budapestcity.org/11-egyeb/kozlekedes/metro/M1/epites-gizella-ter.JPG

Monday, December 14, 2015

Michael Gordin (Princeton): The Russians are Writing! The Cold War Crisis of Scientific Language

Lecture: Michael Gordin: The Russians are Writing! The Cold War Crisis of Scientific Language.
Date: 21. Januar 2016, 18:00-20:00
Venue:: Liebig-Museum, Liebigstraße 12, Gießen
Organizers: The International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture in cooperation with Herder-Institute for Historical Research on Eastern Europe – Institute of Leibniz Association, Marburg
In the history of scientific languages - that is, those languages in which the vast majority of scientific communication is expressed – the early Cold War constituted a major transitional moment. The century-long reign of three dominant languages (English, French, and German) was destabilized by geopolitical transformations in the wake of both World Wars. Consequently, the second most dominant scientific language, with a percentage of global publication equal to German and French combined, was Russian, a language the Western European and North American scientific community had persistently marginalized.
This talk explores the efforts of principally American scientists and policy-makers to confront the enormous linguistic challenge of scientific Russian. After two approaches -teaching Russian to scientists and then the early years of Machine Translation (MT) - foundered in the early 1960s, the stopgap measure of cover-to-cover translation journals took over, and remained the main strategy for scientists outside the Communist Bloc (in the Americas, Europe, and South and East Asia) to engage with the tremendous scientific infrastructure of the Soviet Union. The contingent history of these developments, as this talk argues, set the stage for today’s overwhelming dominance of a single vehicular language for scientific communication: English.
Lecture attendees are also invited to arrive earlier the Liebig-Museum in order to enjoy a guided tour two hours before the lecture or to view the permanent exhibitions from one hour prior to the lecture. Discussions with Prof. Gordin can be continued over dinner at the nearby restaurant Justus im Hessischen Hof.
The event is organized in cooperation with The International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture and is accompanied by a Studientag in Frankfurt/ Main on Cold War Science “Science that Came in from the Cold: Epistemology, Rationality and Cold War Scientific Culture”. For more information about the latter event please contact Jan Surman (jan.surman@herder-institut.de).

Sunday, December 6, 2015

Reminder:CFP:The Authenticity of Collections – an international and interdisciplinary symposium on authenticity, recording and digitization

Herder Institute for Historical Research on Eastern Europe, Marburg, Germany
March 7-11, 2016
As a result of the “material turn” of the last decade, collections in and of themselves have become objects of research. The materiality of collected objects, questions regarding their authenticity, selection and recording are subjects of transdiciplinary and conceptual debates.
In order to investigate these complexes, connections, and interdependencies, scholars have combined methodological and theoretical approaches from various disciplines such as history, art history, archeology, and museology. In a world going ever more digital, immaterial ideas, images, and practices of preservation, necessitate a rethinking and reconceptualization of existing orders.
Combining theoretical approaches with everyday practices of collecting and in collections, this symposium will provide a forum for discussion for graduate and post-graduate students.
The host institute of the symposium, the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe in Marburg, is not only a place for research, but belongs to the few German institutions, where theoretical knowledge on Eastern Europe interacts directly with objects from the region (e.g. books, manuscripts, journals, images). Therefore, the symposium pursues two goals: on the one hand, it off ers a theoretical approach into areas such as Material Cultural Studies and Cultural Heritage Studies; on the other hand, it seeks to illustrate the practices of capturing, recording, and digitizing objects.
To that end, participants have the opportunity to conduct concrete projects in the institute’s three collections, the image, map, and document collection. The symposium aspires to provide an unusual insight into the work in, on, and with collections that diff ers markedly from the experience of “users” and visitors. Thus, following a two-day introduction, the Herder Institute off ers 12 researchers the unique possibility to realize their own projects with the support of the experts working in our collections. Passive knowledge of German and listening comprehension are required.
Please submit your letter of motivation and a short CV as well as contact details
by December 15, 2015 to:
Dr. Eszter Gantner
Email: eszter.gantner@herder-institut.de
 Herder-Insitut für historische Ostmitteleuropaforschung
 

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

CFP: Africa, Eastern Europe and the Dream of International Socialism: New Perspectives on the Global Cold War


European Studies Centre, St Antony's College, Oxford University in partnership with the Centre for Global History and the African Studies Centre, Oxford
28.10.2016-29.10.2016, European Studies Centre, St Antony's College, Oxford University

Recent years have witnessed renewed interest in international and transnational history across the discipline, as the "global turn" in contemporary history writing has recast the field of international relations from a variety of fresh perspectives. Yet there are still key areas of inquiry that remain remarkably under-explored. New transnational histories of the Cold War, for example, have concentrated on the relationship between the so-called First and Third Worlds, or focused on countries in the 'Global South'. Such Cold War histories have addressedprimarily geo-political concerns. Scant consideration has been given to the historical traffic, cultural transfer and personal exchanges between the 'Second' and 'Third World', and in particular between Eastern Europe and Africa. This is unfortunate, given that international socialism took on new meanings in the context of such Cold War contacts, and Eastern Europe and Africa engaged in a great deal of exchange in the decades after World War II, in a wide range of economic, political, cultural and military relations.

These exchanges occurred not only between those of a socialist orientation, but also between groups of distinct ideological hues - potentially shedding new light on the complex interplay between the globalising forces of the late Cold War. This conference is designed to address this forgotten interface of international exchange and knowledge-production during the Cold War. The conference aims not only to explore the post-colonial encounter between socialist Eastern Europe and socialist Africa, but also to investigate how this exchange between the Soviet Union/Eastern Europe and Africa contributes to the story of the rise and fall of socialist globalization. Select themes for the conference would include:
- Education, Science and Technology
- Trade and Development
- Labour and Migration
- Race and Culture
- War and Military Assistance.
The two-day workshop is envisaged as a unique opportunity for Eastern Europeanists and Africanists to come together to share their research and ideas, and to think about this rich yet long-overlooked aspect of Cold War history from a broader inter-regional perspective. We are particularly keen to showcase the work of younger scholars in the field, but the call for papers is open to everyone working in this area. 
Abstracts must be sent to the convenors by January 15, 2016: Paul Betts [paul.betts@history.ox.ac.uk) and Miles Larmer (miles.larmer@history.ox.ac.uk), St Antony's College. 

 Socialism_liberation Czechanti-colonial poster Socialism opened the door of liberation for colonial nations'