Institute of Historical Research Seminar Series

Rethinking Modern Europe

Frédéric Sorrieu, 1848 – Der Traum von der Universellen Demokratischen Republik

‘Rethinking Modern Europe’ is a new IHR seminar which aims to discuss and stimulate new research on modern European history. It wishes to promote debates on how to integrate regional, national, comparative and transnational approaches to history. Invited speakers will be encouraged to look beyond national borders and paradigms, to engage with comparative work and to review existing trends in the historiographies of Europe. Discussions about Europe with a transcontinental focus, and about Europe’s relationship with its colonial past and with the wider world, will also be considered. Understanding European history to include Britain as well as Europe’s former imperial possessions, the seminar seeks to ask questions about the importance of regionalism in Europe, about the meanings of East, West, South and North in relation to Europe and about changing concepts of Europe and the European.

Most mediaevalists and early modernists easily transcend national boundaries in their research, but scholars who work on modern and contemporary subjects often operate within the parameters of the nation state, and overlook wider European trends in history and historiographical research. While the national framework in modern historiography pays tribute to the ‘age of nationalism’ and acknowledges the importance of the creation of nation states since the late eighteenth century, this focus is also the consequence of increased specialisation within the historical profession. By questioning the limitations of national historiography, we aim to rethink how we teach modern European history and how we can encourage future research which attempts to reconnect different parts of Europe.

‘Rethinking Modern Europe’ follows the pattern of other IHR seminars by addressing itself to established historians and graduate students in London, the UK and beyond. Papers will focus on a wide range of topics covering aspects of European history and historiography from the late eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century. In addition to single-authored research papers, there will be presentations on recent graduate work and a number of panel discussions.

All meetings will take place at the IHR on Wednesdays at 5:30 in the German Room unless otherwise stated. The Institute is located in Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 6BT. Nearest tube stations Russell Sq, Euston and Euston Sq. For directions go to http://www.history.ac.uk/visitus.html

Convenors: Dejan Djokic (Goldsmiths), Christian Goeschel (Birkbeck), Helen Jones (Goldsmiths), Axel Körner (UCL), Stephen Lovell (KCL), Lucy Riall (Birkbeck)

Dejan Djokić is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary History and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Balkans, Goldsmiths, University of London. He has previously taught at Birkbeck College and Nottingham University and has held research fellowships at Columbia University and Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (Washington, DC). His publications include Pašić and Trumbić: The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (2010), New Perspectives on Yugoslavia: Key Issues and Controversies (2010, co-editor), Elusive Compromise: A History of Interwar Yugoslavia (2007) and Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea, 1918-1992 (2003, editor).

Christian Goeschel is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. He works on 20th-century German social and cultural history. He has been a research fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Institute of Historical Research and he has just published a major monograph on Suicide in Nazi Germany (2009). His next project will investigate the history of organised crime in interwar Germany and Italy.

Helen Jones is Reader in History at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a specialist in 20th-century British history and her interests include culture and society during the Second World War. She is the author of British Civilians in the Front Line: Air raids, Productivity and Wartime Culture 1939-1945 (2006).

Axel Körner is Reader in Modern European History at University College London and (together with Wendy Bracewell) coordinator of UCL’s Centre for Transnational History. He has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a Visiting Professor at the ENS, Paris. His works include Politics of Culture in Liberal Italy (2009), 1848 – A European Revolution? (2nd. ed. 2003) and Das Lied von einer anderen Welt (1997). He currently works on an AHRC-funded project entitled The American Way of Life. Images of the United States in nineteenth-century Europe and Latin America.

Stephen Lovell is a Reader in European History at King’s College London. His publications include The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras (2000), Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha, 1710-2000 (2003), Destination in Doubt: Russia since 1989 (2006) and The Soviet Union: A Very Short Introduction (2009).

Lucy Riall is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London and the editor of European History Quarterly. She has been a visiting professor at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris and the Freie Universität Berlin. She is the author of Sicily and the unification of Italy. Liberal policy and local power, 1859-66 (1998), Garibaldi. Invention of a hero (2007) and Risorgimento. The history of Italy from Napoleon to nation state (2009). Her article ‘The shallow end of history? On the substance and future of political biography’ is forthcoming in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History in 2010.

2009-2010, Spring Term

All meetings will take place at the IHR on Wednesdays at 5:30 in the German Room unless otherwise stated. The Institute is located in Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 6BT. Nearest tube stations Russell Sq, Euston and Euston Sq. For directions go to http://www.history.ac.uk/visitus.html

20 January 2010

Maike Thier (UCL)

Yankeeism, Phylloxera and Miss Liberty:

Rethinking French Images of the United States (ca. 1848-ca. 1886)

Chair: Axel Körner

27 January 2010

Bianca Gaudenzi (Cambridge)

Commercial Advertising in Germany and Italy, 1918 – 1945

(in cooperation with the Modern Italy and German History seminars)

Chair: Stephen Gundle (Warwick)

3 February 2010

Emma de Angelis (LSE)

Eastern Europe and European identity in the discourse of the European Parliament, 1974-2004

Chair: Dejan Djokić

17 February 2010

Catriona Kelly (Oxford)

A European City in Russia: Rethinking the History of St Petersburg

Chair: Stephen Lovell

17 March 2010

Richard Overy (Exeter) and Richard Vinen (KCL)

Britain through a European prism

Chair: Helen Jones

Past Seminars and Speakers

7 October 2009

Peter Burke (University of Cambridge)

The European Republic of Letters, 1500-2000

Chair: Lucy Riall

11 November 2009

Katherine Fleming (New York University)

Herzl at the Akropolis-or-Big Histories, Small States:

Greece, Israel, and the Limits of the Nation

Chair: Axel Körner

25 November 2009

Maria Todorova (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

Historical legacies between Europe and the Near East

Chair: Dejan Djokic

2 December 2009

Dominic Lieven (London School of Economics)

The Napoleonic Wars: European or Global Conflict?

Chair: Stephen Lovell

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Contact

If you would like to join our mailing list please contact Dr Axel Körner - a.korner@ucl.ac.uk