current projects

Sarah Czerney (Doc-Project) : Between the Nation and Europe. National Museums as Media of European Historiography

Writing history in a context broader than the national one, is one of the most challenging tasks not only for historical sciences, but also for contemporary history museums in Europe. The PhD-project focusses on four national museums in Germany, Poland and France and examines, from the point of media studies, how they try to overcome the national framework of their exhibition narratives: Which media are used in the exhibitions to create and legitimate a discourse on a common European history? Whose history is it? Who is not included?

Eszter Gantner (Post-Doc Project): Urania, Industrial Palace and  Logos – 

The urban forms of knowledge in Budapest 1873-1914

Industrial palace - Budapest 1917

The project focuses on the interaction of knowledge transfer and urbanization in Central Europe 1880-1914. This happens through analyzing three cases of urban forms of knowledge production and communication: the astronomical institution “Urania”, the Industry palace  and the philosophical journal “Logos” in Budapest between 1873 and 1914. The project formulates the hypothesis, that these various “knowledge formats” of scientific activities had been products of the urban development of Budapest. The application of the concept of “knowledge formats” enables to analyze and capture the complex interaction between city, knowledge and social agents. 

Victoria Harms (Post-Doc Project) : Destination: Prosperity? East Central Europe’s transformation, 1979 to 2004.

The long shadow of Reaganomics? Ronald Reagan’s life-size statue on Budapest’s Freedom Square. The plaque reads: “A Country Boy against the Evil Empire.”

Through the lens of a Hungarian weekly, the HVG (World Economic Weekly), this project investigates the economic, political, and social transformations of Eastern Europe from 1979 until 2004. The liberal, left of center weekly was modeled on The Economist and Der Spiegel and at first protected by reform-minded officials in the Chamber of Commerce. The HVG sheds light on the search for reforms in ‘the happiest barrack in the Eastern bloc’ as Hungary was known since the 1960s, the arduous path of emancipation from COMECON, the adoption of private market mechanisms, and after 1989 privatization, deregulation, liberalization, and the country’s opening to foreign investors. Not only does this study inquire about the discourse on alternative economic models, the scope of social criticism, and comparisons with other countries in East and West but also the impact of the transformation on the media and the public discourse in East Central Europe.

 

Jan Surman (Post-Doc project):Between Nation, Empire and Transnationality: Central-European Science and their Languages in the Long 19^th Century

 

Parts of the Instruction for collecting folk scientific terminology, published 1928 by the Natural Scientific Department of the Institute for Ukrainian Language of Ukrainian Academy of Science. End of the period of Ukrainization prohibited the results to be published. (Instrukcija do zbyrannja movnoho materijalu z haluzy pryrodničoï terminolohii ta nomenklatury, Kyiv: Ukraïns’ka Akademija Nauk. Instytut Ukraïns’koï Naukovoï Movy. Pryrodnyčyj Viddil 1928, p. 5)

My project „Between Nation, Empire and Transnationality: Central-European Science and their Languages in the Long 19th Century“ deals with the question of modeling of scientific terminologies in Czech, Polish and Ukrainian in the years 1780-1930. I investigate how scientists, predominantly chemists and physicians, imagined the perfect language for their scholarship and how they put it into practice. Since three languages I deal with, were at the time at different stages in the process of development as literary languages, had different past and political situation, my project allows to observe how politics, literary theories and philosophy of language intersected and mediated with scientific knowledge influencing scientific terminology and thus also science itself.