Extended Submission Deadline (December 15th): "Ambivalent Legacies: Memory and Amnesia in Post-Habsburg and Post-Ottoman Cities" (April 2017, MPI-MMG, Goettingen)

Jeremy F. Walton Discussion

 

Please find attached the updated call for abstracts for our upcoming conference, "Ambivalent Legacies: Memory and Amnesia in Post-Habsburg and Post-Ottoman Cities,” to be held on April 26th through 28th of 2017 at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Goettingen, Germany. The conference will be hosted by our research group, "Empires of Memory: The Cultural Politics of Historicity in Former Habsburg and Ottoman Cities." Our updated deadline for submission is December 15th; please do not hesitate to contact us if you should have further questions. Further information is available at http://www.mmg.mpg.de/departments/max-planck-research-group-empires-of-memory/ 

Sincerely,

Jeremy F. Walton

Research Group Leader

Empires of Memory

 

CFA: “Ambivalent Legacies: Memory and Amnesia in Post-Habsburg and Post-Ottoman Cities”


The empires that once defined the political geography of Europe are no more. One cannot meet a Prussian, Romanov, Habsburg, or Ottoman today; these dusty categories of affiliation have ceded to myriad national identities. Yet it would be mistaken to assume that Europe’s bygone empires have become mere relics of history. Imperial pasts continue to inspire nostalgia, identification, pride, anxiety, skepticism, and disdain in the present. The afterlives of empires as objects of memory exceed historical knowledge, precisely because these afterlives shape and recast the present and the future. Simultaneously, present- and future-oriented imperatives accentuate imperial pasts in selective ways, yielding new configurations of post-imperial amnesia as well as memory.


Our conference, “Ambivalent Legacies: Memory and Amnesia in Post-Habsburg and Post-Ottoman Cities,” aims to bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars working on post-imperial legacies, especially in relation to eight specific cities: Vienna, Istanbul, Budapest, Sarajevo, Trieste, Thessaloniki, Zagreb, and Belgrade. We seek contributions from historians, sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, and scholars of comparative literature and architecture—among others—that pursue the politics and cultures of memory in one or more of our eight cities. Paper proposals should speak to two general, interrelated questions: What are the effects of imperial legacies on contemporary cities? and How do present-day urban processes reshape the forms of post-imperial memory and forgetting? The conference will convene at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity from April 26th to 28th, 2017. Conference participants will be provided with lodging and will be reimbursed for their travel. Please send abstracts of 250 words, along with a brief academic biography, to Marina Cziesielsky at Cziesielsky@mmg.mpg.de by December 1st, 2016.