Monday, 21 July 2025

Екатерина Жарова: Биология в фокусе. Естественные отделения университетов Российской империи (1830–1900).

 Екатерина Жарова: Биология в фокусе. Естественные отделения университетов Российской империи (1830–1900). Новое литературное обозрение 2025. ISBN 978-5-4448-2646-1 // Еkaterina Zharova: Biology in Focus. Natural Sciences Departments at Universities in the Russian Empire (1830–1900). New Literary Review 2025. ISBN 978-5-4448-2646-1



Аннотация: Изучение истории высшего образования в России не только дает возможность проследить генеалогию его актуальных проблем, но и позволяет взглянуть на российское общество в микрокосме. В своей монографии Екатерина Жарова рассматривает историю естественных отделений физико-математических факультетов университетов Российской империи с момента их появления в середине 1830 х годов и до начала XX века. Автора интересуют важнейшие аспекты научной жизни: организация обучения (лекции, практические занятия, экзамены), формирование профессорско-преподавательского корпуса и лабораторной базы, специализация и профессионализация. Отдельный важный аспект исследования — попытка проследить роль государства в развитии естественных наук. Анализируя влияние государственной политики на изучение и преподавание биологии, автор показывает, как на университетской жизни отразились исторические трансформации, вызванные сменой эпох — от Александра I до Николая II. Екатерина Жарова — доктор исторических наук, старший научный сотрудник СПбФ ИИЕТ РАН.

Sunday, 20 July 2025

Call for papers: Entanglements of Scale and Spheres in History

 Call for papers: Entanglements of Scale and Spheres in History: Between the Local, Regional, Global, and Planetary. University of Bielefeld, 14.11.2025 - 5.11.2025, Deadline 31.08.2025


With this conference, we invite researchers at all career stages to reflect critically on the conceptual and methodological entanglements of scales and spheres in global and entangled history. The conference deals with conceptual and methodological questions of how to write global and entangled history and cross-area-studies. In particular, it will focus on the challenge to decentralise the human gaze and world-historical time of humans, to include more-than-human perspectives. This is of special importance in times in which the planet overwrites the globe(Spivak), or in a new epoch framed as the Anthropocene.

Thinking and writing about the past and present, be it from a sociological, geographical, historical, or political perspective, is undergoing a 'planetary turn'. This turn captures how the planet — as a humanist category and as a natural space for interactions between humans, non-humans and physical processes of the Earth — is becoming the referential dimension in which scholars think and write about global and entangled history, by asking how including landscapes, climate changes, histories of oceans and volcanoes, animals, the cosmological phenomena of space and time as well as the geobiological time of the planet change our understanding of global and crossarea flows and interconnections.

The planetary turn points us to the idea of nested systems in vast timeframes and vast distances. Building on this, we are interested in the multiscalarity of historical processes, i.e., in relational, interpenetrating processes that belong to different temporal and territorial orders but are interconnected through networked relationships and persistent leverage effects. By embracing the planetary turn, we aim to critically examine it, questioning the extent to which it actually represents a new dimension of historical understanding or merely a new label for conventional ways of looking at global interconnections, non-human actors, and their interwovenness. By doing so, we invite a discussion on the historical understanding and framing of global human and anthropogenic processes and multiscalar and multicentric approaches to global and entangled history as well as their interplay. The conference aims to foster an interdisciplinary discussion on planetary thinking, materiality, human as praxis, and related topics, as they inform these methodological considerations. Theoretically oriented or case study-based papers that would speak to one or more of the following questions would be especially welcome:

- Does global/globe thinking dissolve into planetary thinking? What is the locus of encunciation of planetary thinking?

- How can (trans-)area studies relate and/or correct planetary thinking? Is it necessary to regionalize planetary thinking?

- How can non-human-centred thinking help us sharpen our multiscalar view and make it fruitful for approaches to global history?

- What forms of otherness and diverse fluid world orders does the planetary perspective make us more aware of?

- How does the local scale reflect the planetary scale?

- How are the local, regional, and global dimensions tied to the planetary scale, and how do local or regional cultural, political, and societal practices (re-)shape a 'common consciousness' (Mbembe) or at least a co-habitation of the world and deal with the multiple planetary crisis?

What does planetary responsibility and thinking in planetary dimensions mean for familiar narratives of globalisation and transregional interconnections?

We especially encourage contributions from Early Career Researchers and scholars working at disciplinary intersections: As part of the conference, an Early Career Researcher panel will be held, dedicated to showcasing new and emerging research in area studies, featuring the work of early-career scholars (defined as PhD students or post-doctoral scholars who have received their PhD since 2022). As CrossArea brings together leading scholars of area studies from throughout Germany, this is an excellent opportunity for scholars looking to make an impression and identify potential hosts for their next professional move. Those selected to present on their research will be provided with travel grants, as well as accommodation for up to two nights.

Format and Submission Guidelines:

We welcome proposals for 15-minute presentations from researchers of various disciplines engaged in conceptual and methodological dialogue on how to write multiscalar global history between the local, regional, global, and planetary. Proposals of no more than 300 words (in English or German) along with a short CV (1 page) should be sent as a single PDF to the following address by the 30th August 2025: justynaturkowska@me.com & reka.krizmanics@uni-bielefeld.de.

The conference will be held in person at Bielefeld University (hybrid participation possible on request; please indicate in your proposal). Travel and accommodation support for early career scholars and unfunded presenters may be available; please indicate your need in your application.

Important Dates:

- Deadline for submission of the papers: 30th August, 2025

- Notification of Selection: 30th September, 2025

Kontakt

Dr. Justyna Aniceta Turkowska: justynaturkowska@me.com;

Dr Réka Krizmanics: reka.krizmanics@uni-bielefeld.de;

Wednesday, 16 July 2025

Call for papers: The Prague Linguistic Circle in Geneva and Paris

Call for papers: The Prague Linguistic Circle in Geneva and Paris: Circulations and Decenterings. Fribourg, 10 - 11 September 2026


The Prague Linguistic Circle holds a clearly defined place in the historiography of the language sciences: it is recognized as an institutional and localized "hub" (Hoskovec 2011) of programmatic innovation, representing a pivotal moment in the broad transition from 19th-century philological models to the new paradigms of 20th-century linguistics. While the Circle’s European and international influence—particularly the fundamental impact of its contributions to the development of structural phonology—is well known, most of its historians and commentators have focused primarily on its specific context in Prague itself (e.g., Vachek 1966, Viel 1984, Raynaud 1990, Toman 1995, Sériot 2012). In line with a certain cliché that casts the city of Prague as a “golem-like” site of magical encounters (Ripellino 1973, Flusser 1991), the Circle and its theoretical originality are often presented as the product of syncretism, or even as the precipitate of a kind of fusion between different traditions suddenly brought together in the capital of the new Czechoslovak state.

Without seeking to challenge either the specific dynamic of the Circle’s local grounding in Prague’s modernity or its theoretical originality—especially in contrast with other centers of linguistics (Leipzig, Paris, Geneva, Copenhagen, etc.)—this conference aims instead to focus on the international integration and reception of the Prague Circle within the scientific exchange networks and channels of intellectual circulation of its time. We wish, in particular, to interrogate a certain methodological dichotomy that tends to oppose what could be called the integrative or symbiotic dimension of local contexts to the more diffuse or decentered nature of the international context.

This tension is not unique to the historiography of the Prague Linguistic Circle. It seems to be a structural feature of the system of “double legitimation,” both internal and external, that characterizes the functioning of “circles” or “schools” of thought in the humanities (Amsterdamska 1987, Puech 2015). This tension invites us to consider two approaches to the internationalization of the Prague Circle’s activities during the period of linguistic circles from the 1920s to the 1950s. Alongside a network-based or nodal model of exchanges between relatively autonomous hubs, circles, or poles, we might also consider a more concentric approach that accounts for the interweaving or overlapping of these various poles. The first perspective tends to reinforce the image of a system of diffuse communications forming more compact “nodes” between which circulations (contacts, exchanges, receptions of works, etc.) occur. The second model does not envision exchanges between distinct hubs, but rather overlaps or intersections among these circles, thus revealing forms of decentering in the practices or intellectual horizons of participants in these canonized circles or schools.


Call for papers

The conference invites reflection on the internationalization of the Prague Linguistic Circle within the Francophone world, symbolized here—without being limited to—Geneva and Paris. In particular, this conference invites us to consider the Prague Linguistic Circle in Geneva and Paris—not as an external reference point to the Genevan and Parisian contexts, but as a full-fledged agent shaping the theoretical horizons and practices of these intellectual contexts. We therefore welcome original contributions addressing scholarly and/or conceptual relations between Prague, Paris, and Geneva in the fields of language sciences, semiotics, literary studies, art history, or philosophy.

Contributions may explore circulations and decenterings between Geneva, Paris, and Prague in light of:

An interdisciplinary contextualization, seeking traces of the Prague Linguistic Circle beyond language sciences, in the exchanges and interactions that shaped or energized the intellectual contexts of Prague, Paris, and Geneva as a whole.

Archival and documentary materials relating to the activities of the Prague Circle that have been made available in recent years (Toman 1994, Troubetzkoy 2006, Havránková 2008, Čermák et al. 2012, Jakobson 2013, 2014, Havránková & Petkevič 2014, Toman 2017). The use of these materials can offer new insights into already explored themes, such as the distinctive Saussurianism of the Prague and Geneva schools (e.g., Koerner 1971: 295 ff.), or the difficult reception of Prague functionalism among French philologists (e.g., Chevalier 1997).

Well-known intersections between the Prague Circle and the Geneva School (Karcevskij), or with French linguistic networks (Tesnière, Benveniste, Martinet), as well as overlooked figures and phenomena in historiography. For example, one might investigate the place given in Prague Circle work to French-language linguistics (Bally, Grammont, Meillet, Sechehaye, Vendryes, etc.), but also to philosophy (Bergson, Lévy-Bruhl), psychology (Delacroix, Meyerson), or literary theory (Václav Černý, Thibaudet).

The role of Czechoslovak scholars or émigrés from Russia in the activities of the Société de linguistique de Paris, the Geneva Linguistics Society (which preceded, from 1941 to 1956, the Ferdinand de Saussure Circle), or the circumstances surrounding the creation of the Bratislava Linguistic Circle in 1946, and its explicit alignment with the speech-focused themes of the Geneva School (Isačenko 1948).

The broader backdrop of Russian and Ukrainian emigration (to Prague, Paris, Berlin, Geneva). The Russian and Ukrainian émigrés of the Prague Circle participated in networks of exchange and communication not structured around local institutions, but through transversal links across various émigré communities. These networks—and especially their potential importance for the history of language sciences—remain largely unstudied.

A reappraisal of well-known figures such as Jakobson, not through a diachronic lens that follows his successive affiliations with the Moscow, Prague, Copenhagen, and New York Circles, but through a synchronic lens, considering him as a key actor in an almost continuous or at least systematic dialogue between these local contexts.

Please send abstracts of maximum 500 words to patrick.flack@unifr.ch and pierre-yves.testenoire@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr

Deadline: November 30th 2025

Notification of Acceptance: January 31st 2026

Scientific Board

Sylvie Archaimbault (Sorbonne Université)

Gabriel Bergounioux (Université d’Orléans)

Lorenzo Cigana (Università San Raffaele Roma)

Anna Maria Curea (Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca)

Marina De Palo (Sapienza Università di Roma)

Claire Forel (Université de Genève)

Janette Friedrich (Sigmund Freud Universität)

Tomáš Hoskovec (Jihočeská univerzita)

Petra James (Université Libre de Bruxelles)

John Joseph (University of Edinburgh)

Christian Puech (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle)

Savina Raynaud (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano)

Didier Samain (Sorbonne Université)

Ondřej Sládek (Masarykova univerzita)

Anne-Gaëlle Toutain (Université de Berne)

Bohumil Vykypěl (Jihočeská univerzita)

Ekaterina Velmezova (Université de Lausanne)

Klaas Willems (Ghent University)

Call for papers: Foucault at 100: Echoes and Encounters in Central and Eastern Europe

 Call for papers: Foucault at 100: Echoes and Encounters in Central and Eastern Europe 

Deadline for submission: 15 November 2025

on the address: foucault100ece@flu.cas.cz

Date and Location:

Prague (1–2 June 2026) and Warsaw (4–5 June 2026)

Host Institutions

The Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences

Centre français de recherche en sciences sociales en Prague (CEFRES)

Centre de civilisation française et d’études francophones en Pologne (CCFEF)

Organizing Committee: Mateusz Chmurski, Isabel Jacobs, Jiří Růžička, Radosław Szymański, Laurent Tatarenko

Contact Email: foucault100ece@flu.cas.cz

How can a persisting and truly global interest in Foucault’s thought – from Europe to Japan, through the United States and Brazil – be explained? To become the eloquent and inventive critic of the many projects associated with the “Western” world to which he belonged, Foucault had to first grapple with the elusive outlines of modern thought. By criticizing approaches that tried to present “the subject” as a clear object of study, and instead highlighting those that sought to explore the different practices of subjectification, he made “others” understandable to the “West” – and the “West” understandable to the rest of the world. However, the relationship between Foucault’s works and the “West” – its canon and its various intellectual endeavors – is far from straightforward.

One particular place where this question can be fruitfully asked is Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), where Foucault stayed for some years at the beginning of his career (he worked on his thesis, later published as The History of Madness, in Warsaw in 1958), and where his works enjoyed lasting influence among scholars and intellectuals. The question remains open as to whether, and to what extent, Foucault’s conceptual tools can be applied beyond so-called “Western Europe”, the primary context of his reflections. Were Foucault-inspired analyses carried out in CEE liable to produce a distorted image of the region? And how might rethinking Foucault from the vantage point of CEE shift our perception on both his oeuvre and the so-called “West”? Finally, how was Foucault’s own thinking shaped by CEE thought and his encounters with the region?

Over the past thirty years, scholars both from CEE countries and those working on issues related to this area have produced numerous books, articles, and studies influenced, either primarily or partially, immediately or mediated by Foucauldian perspectives, which opened up conceptually new horizons. Many of these publications have become benchmarks in their respective disciplines (Maria Todorova, Alexei Yurchak, Stephen Kotkin, Stephen J. Collier, and many others). What were the reasons for this interest? As Foucault’s popularity in CEE coincided with major political upheavals and new challenges, could this reception be considered a search for intellectual alternatives to the political thought which supposedly undergirded previous communist regimes? Was it hoped that Foucault’s thought could provide a new social perspective? Was he supposed to inspire academics from Central Europe in their concerted retreat from Marxism-Leninism?

It appears that the vicissitudes of the reception of Foucault in the CEE context give rise to a paradox: though Foucault militated against system-building, insofar as he was cast as a promising alternative to the former keystones of social theory, he became inducted to academic textbooks as a classic of social thought even more surely than in France. Who, and with what intent, were the intellectual actors in introducing him to the academic communities in the region, by way of translations, special issues of academic journals or textbooks? Furthermore, our symposium aims to inquire about the particular modes of Foucault’s reception in CEE academia, as well as in public discourse and activism. What were the intermediaries, the channels, and the ‘stopovers’ on the way by which his thought travelled to CEE? Was it a Foucault from Paris or Berkeley, a Foucault in French, English, German, or Italian? Might it have been Rabinow’s or Agamben’s Foucault?

Whatever the reason for Foucault’s pervasive presence, it may not be an exaggeration to say that sometimes scholars from the region draw on Foucault’s ideas without even realizing it. His influence is so deeply embedded in academic discourse that some of his concepts have migrated in various fields where they are used almost uncritically. In our view, a more comprehensive reflection on Foucault’s methodologies and their application to CEE issues has yet to be thoroughly undertaken. Hegel – Foucault’s philosophical archenemy, whose influence he never entirely escaped – argued that any method worthy of the name must, to some extent, follow the activity of the object itself rather than imposing a framework upon it. Foucault, too, embraced this perspective, adapting his approach to suit the problem at hand rather than forcing reality into predetermined structures. This is a crucial lesson to keep in mind when transferring ideas and concepts from one cultural and social context to another. While such a transfer is certainly possible, the transformative work it requires is far less obvious and considerably more demanding.

In this regard, the 100th anniversary of Foucault’s birth presents a unique opportunity to reflect on past contributions, current developments, and future directions of Foucauldian approaches to CEE issues. As the event is the result of a collaborative effort between three institutions across two cities, we have decided to divide it between Prague and Warsaw. The first two days will take place in Prague, followed by a break before continuing in Warsaw. However, this division is not only spatial and temporal but also thematic. Prague will host participants presenting papers on epistemology, philosophy, gender, and aesthetics, while Warsaw will focus on discussions surrounding power, governmentality, and ethics.

We want to discuss together, for example, but not be strictly limited to, the following topics:

Critical reflections on how Foucault’s concepts (e.g., power, biopolitics, governmentality) have been applied and transformed in CEE scholarship.

Evaluations of the strengths, limitations, and effects of Foucauldian methodologies in interpreting CEE social, political and historical realities.

Methodological challenges of transferring Foucauldian concepts across different cultural and social contexts.

Prospects for future uses of Foucault’s ideas in CEE contexts: new fields, emerging issues, and conceptual adaptations.

Dialogues and intersections between Foucault’s approaches and major CEE thinkers (e.g., Gáspár Miklós Tamás, Karel Kosík, Jan Patočka, Witold Kula, Ágnes Heller, Evald Ilyenkov, Zygmunt Bauman, Julia Kristeva).

Intellectual agents and institutions that mediated Foucault’s reception: translations, academic journals, textbooks, public discourse.

How CEE intellectual traditions might challenge, supplement, or transform Foucauldian frameworks.

Foucault’s engagement with the East-West divide; Foucault and the Cold War.

The proposal should include a short abstract (200 words max.), a title, affiliation and a few lines of biography, and possibly a preference for location if papers fall into both thematic strands: Prague (epistemology, gender, and aesthetics) and Warsaw (power, governmentality, and ethics).

CFP: Theoretical and practical aspects of East European development aid to Africa during the Cold War era

 CFP: Theoretical and practical aspects of East European development aid to Africa during the Cold War era, Workshop, University of Warsaw, 20-21 November 2025

The Warsaw Centre for Global History invites colleagues to participate in a workshop exploring theoretical and practical aspects of Eastern European development aid in Africa, as well as economic cooperation between Eastern European and African countries during the Cold War era.

For most of the 20th century, Eastern Europe and Africa shared experiences of underdevelopment and aspirations to overcome it. Decolonization in Africa opened a space for Eastern European countries, which themselves had experience of dependance, to engage in development aid on the continent. Given their experience during the interwar period in overcoming underdevelopment resulting from previous subjugation to European imperial monarchies, coupled with their emphasis on national economic sovereignty, these nations could serve as an attractive and alternative model for newly independent countries with similar ambitions.

The Cold War marked the emergence of development studies as a distinct academic discipline. Scholars from Eastern and Central Eastern Europe did not lag behind in this evolution. While Western studies of dependency and underdevelopment focused primarily on the Global South, researchers from the East could also draw on empirical materials from their part of the world. For example, in Poland, historian Marian Małowist identified the roots of underdevelopment in Eastern Europe and Africa in early modern history. Specialized academic chairs and institutes were established to research development issues and provide expertise. Additionally, these institutions offered educational exchange programs for visitors from developing countries. Internationally recognized economists such as Oskar Lange and Michał Kalecki conceptualized their observations and provided expertise to governments of developing countries in the Third World.

Eastern Europeans managed their development efforts while working to overcome underdevelopment in their home countries, a fact acknowledged by their leadership. These countries could not match the volume and scope of development aid provided by the West. While they spoke the Soviet language of solidarity, domestic economic performance more than ideological factors seemed to inform their developmental initiatives. Development aid also involved some degree of competition, not only with the West but also inside the Eastern bloc. Eastern European countries generally steered clear of Soviet efforts to coordinate development initiatives in the regional framework. Instead, they engaged in what scholars refer to as "socialist bilateralism."

States played a significant role in promoting socialist development aid efforts. Communist parties influenced the geography of development aid by regulating the movement of expertise, controlling who could enter or leave their countries. In addition, East European experts were carefully selected to represent the appropriate ideological profile. Nevertheless, direct contacts with citizens of the Global South opened up opportunities for the exchange of ideas on the pitfalls of development policy in countries ruled by progressive regimes within Socialist societies that were subject to official censorship. Internal discussions among Communist Party members, meetings of their International Departments, and the proceedings of specialized international commissions provided a platform for exchanging views on development directions and models. Historians of Eastern European anti-colonial social movements recognize that, although these movements were closely linked to the state, there was still a degree of criticism directed at their countries’ excessive or insufficient development efforts in the decolonizing world. Additionally, popular culture, magazines, analyses by economic experts, press bulletins aimed at Communist party members and state apparatus, as well as journalistic accounts all contributed to disseminating knowledge about the societies and cultures of African countries. We are specifically seeking contributions based on these diverse official and unofficial documents in relation to the following problems:

1. The concept of the development

Among the key topics to be discussed is the very idea of development. Scholars agree that its origins can be traced to the late colonial era, specifically in the European colonial powers’ discourse on the so-called civilizing mission. Among the justifications of colonial rule was the responsibility to participate in the advancement of economic and social conditions of the colonized societies. By the post-World War II period, development discourse had taken a different tone, emphasizing the need to transform Africa according to patterns imposed by the West or the East.  From the economic point of view, development drew the line between the industrialized countries and resource-producing agrarian economies.

The discussants will try to answer the following questions: In what ways (if any?) did the Eastern European concept of development differ from the contemporary Western, postcolonial or Soviet, anti-imperial models? What criteria and parameters were used as determinants of development?

2. The flow of knowledge on development

We would also like to consider the flow of knowledge on development. Since the 1950s, political economy and research into the challenges faced by the developing world have reflected global tensions, diverging into two distinct approaches: one focused on pro-market developing economies and the other on those with socialist orientations. Early Western development theories, which eventually dominated the field, were informed by the experiences of the so-called first generation of newly industrialized countries - in other words developing nations – in Latin America or East Asia who had prioritized pro-market orientation. The focus of development models would evolve – from industrialization to the provision of basic needs via agriculture before the neoliberal model emerged in 1980s.

How did international debates on development resonate in Eastern European countries? Did these countries create distinct theories on development? If so, was this expertise based on first-hand contacts with the new nations in Africa and recognition of their unique conditions? Or was it an adaptation of Eastern European Marxism and their own experience in fighting against underdevelopment?

3. The rationale for providing aid

Eastern European countries used the language of solidarity to emphasise their separation from colonial legacies and their specific approach to development aid. It would be valuable to explore the relationship between the official discourse and the motivations outlined in the internal documents of political parties, official journalism, or economic analyses. Were there efforts to understand the social specifics of Africa, considering the various paths of modernization? To what extent did development policies serve as tools for securing Eastern European countries’ specific interests, such as promoting Marxism-Leninism globally, accessing African markets, or the globalization of foreign policies? Furthermore, how did the official justifications and practices of development evolve over time in connection with changes in regimes, ruling elites, and their economic priorities? Of particular importance is the relationship between Eastern European development initiatives and the political regimes of African countries. Were Marxist-governed countries, such as Mozambique, Angola, and Ethiopia, treated differently from other African nations?

4. Planning and organization of expertise

The development and organization of expertise could serve as a foundation for examining both the intentions behind state policies on cooperation with independent African countries, and the perceptual frameworks that accompany them. It would be interesting to study the practical and theoretical preparation of expert personnel travelling to Africa, whether for aid programs or profit-driven ventures. Contributions could consider programs in African studies, courses tailored to the specific needs of various fields related to Africa, language training, and health and diet counselling.

Scholars interested in attending the workshop are invited to send 300-word abstract, including the title, the current or a most recent academic affiliation and a short bio to: eeurope-africa@uw.edu.pl by September 1, 2025.

Notification of acceptance will be sent by September 15, 2025.

Organisers cover accommodation for two nights in Warsaw and travel expenses.

The working language of the conference is English.

Organisers:

prof. Marek Pawełczak, Faculty of History, University of Warsaw

dr Anna Konieczna, Centre for French Culture and Francophone Studies, University of Warsaw

dr Filip Urbański, Faculty of Political Sciences and International Studies, University of Warsaw

References

Burton, Eric, Anne Dietrich, Immanuel Harisch, i Marcia Schenck, red. Navigating Socialist Encounters. Boston, MA: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2021.

Decker, Corrie, i Elisabeth McMahon. The Idea of Development in Africa: A History. New Approaches to African History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Kalinovsky, Artemy M. „Sorting Out the Recent Historiography of Development Assistance: Consolidation and New Directions in the Field”. Journal of Contemporary History 56, nr 1 (2021): 227–39.

Lorenzini, Sara. Global Development: A Cold War History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.

Mark, James, i Paul Betts. Socialism Goes Global: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.

Mark, James, Artemy M. Kalinovsky, i Steffi Marung, red. Alternative Globalizations. Bloomington Indiana: Indiana University Press. Dostęp 28 maj 2025.

Muehlenbeck, Philip E., i Natalia Telepneva, red. Warsaw Pact Intervention in the Third World. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.

Contact Information

dr Anna Konieczna

Centre for French Culture and Francophone Studies | University of Warsaw 

ul. Dobra 55 (s. 3.009)

00-312 Warszawa

www.okf.uw.edu.pl

Sunday, 13 July 2025

CFP: Ludwik Fleck and the Historiography of Science: The Theory of Thought Styles and Thought Collectives at the Centennial

Paweł Jarnicki and Mauro Condé are pleased to announce a forthcoming edited volume on Ludwik Fleck, to be published by Springer. You can find the call for papers here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rk3Q8xNf9bLu9XPG8uOufmNnkk8wLFGO/view?usp=sharing. They would be grateful if you could share it widely within your networks. We all look forward to receiving your proposals and contributions for this book. 

2026 Joint ESHS & HSS Meeting, Edinburgh, Scotland, 13-16 July 2026

 2026 Joint ESHS & HSS Meeting, Edinburgh, Scotland, 13-16 July 2026


Call for Proposals: 2026 Joint Meeting of the European Society for the History of Science (ESHS) and History of Science Society (HSS)


Title: Shifting Perspectives: Plural Worlds, Contested Sciences

Location: University of Edinburgh, Scotland

Dates: 13-16 July 2026


Organized by:

The History of Science Society (HSS)

The European Society for the History of Science (ESHS)

With support from

The British Society for the History of Science (BSHS)


Deadline for submitting proposals:   Friday 1 December 2025, 11:59 pm PST (Abstract Submission Site to come)


Link to the full Call For Proposals is available here<https://hssonline.org/page/2026cfp>


Friday, 11 July 2025

Oleksandra Buzko: Maria Viazmitina. Archaeological Expedition to Parthia.

Олександра Бузько: Марія Вязмітіна. археологічна експедиція у Парфію.Kyiv,  Видання Інституту археології НАНУ, 2025. // Oleksandra Buzko: Maria Viazmitina. Archaeological Expedition to Parthia.Kyiv,  Видання Інституту археології НАНУ, 2025.

[Українська версія нижче]

 This bilingual book, in Ukrainian and English, is the result of Oleksandra's research into the life, work, and scientific legacy of the outstanding Ukrainian archaeologist Maria Vyazmitina, based on materials from the archaeologist's personal archive at the Institute of Archaeology.

This publication is important for both Ukrainian science and world archaeology, as it allows the global scientific community to access archival materials from archaeological expeditions to Central Asia in the 20th century, highlights the contribution of Ukrainian archaeologists to this field, contributes to the study of women archaeologists in a global context, and presents a study of the archaeology of Ukraine during the Soviet period in its historical context.


----

 Ця книга-білінгва, українською та англійською, є результатом дослідження пані Олександрою життєвого і творчого шляху та наукової спадщини видатної української археологині Марії Вязмітіної, на матеріалах персонального архіву археологині в Інституті археології.

Це видання є надзвичайно важливим як для української науки,  так й для світової археології, оскільки воно робить доступними для світової наукової спільноти архівні матеріали археологічних експедицій до Середньої Азії 20 століття, висвітлює вклад наших археологів в цю наукову сферу, вносить свою лепту у дослідження теми жінок-археологинь в світовому контексті, та є дослідженням археології України радянського періоду в історичному контексті.


Sunday, 6 July 2025

CFP: ‘Power Couples? Collaborations at work and at home, c. 1750-1914’

 CALL FOR PAPERS:

‘Power Couples? Collaborations at work and at home, c. 1750-1914’ workshop

Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany

11-13 May 2026

In recent decades, there has emerged an important wave of scholarship by historians, philosophers, literary scholars, biographers, and sociologists (amongst others), which has unveiled the crucial ‘hidden’ intellectual, social, and domestic labour women have provided throughout history in helping to make the careers and public reputations of their male colleagues, family members, and partners. This scholarship has illuminated the myriad harmful ways women’s historical labour has been effaced, during their lifetimes, in the subsequent historiography, and in archival institutions. The reasons why female accomplishments have long been marginalised in public consciousness has often been discussed under the term ‘Matilda Effect’—a concept that has also gained traction in wider public discourse.

However, a key phenomenon within collaborative cultures remains strikingly under-researched: the role played by couples whose collaborations were openly acknowledged, and the impact they have had on the making of modern political, intellectual, professional, academic, and religious cultures. As such, this international workshop will bring together scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and career stages to explore this phenomenon. Our focus is the period spanning the mid eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, a period marked by notable changes in women’s rights, access to education, religious thinking, means of travel and mass communication, as well as the development of modern professions, civil society, and the nation-state. In particular, the workshop is interested in historicising the roots of the term ‘power couple’. Although this term originated in Anglophone contexts in the 1980s, the preceding centuries had already seen an unprecedented growth of couples attempting to carve out new public reputations together, be this in politics and social reform, universities, religious contexts, business ownership, the arts, medicine, and across a range of other fields.

The workshop seeks to explore the following questions: 1.) How did different couples organise and maintain their collaborative work and domestic lives? 2.) How did gender, race, ethnicity, and class shape collaborative endeavours? 3.) What similarities and differences were there between queer collaborating couples and those in legal marital partnerships? 4.) How were collaborations shaped by different local, national, and global contexts? 5.) What synergies were there between different fields and networks? 6.) To what extent did couples who collaborated seek to promote greater equality in their wider, respective areas of work?

During the workshop, participants will discuss their different methodological approaches including biographical, quantitative, and digital methods, and will examine diverse source materials, such as correspondence, periodicals, publications, diaries, and photographs.

We very much welcome ‘work-in-progress’ papers and suggestions for non-traditional ways of discussing this topic. A peer-reviewed publication of the workshop’s outcomes is also planned.

The deadline for submissions of interest is 1 September 2025.

The organisers are Dr Sven Jaros (sven.jaros@geschichte.uni-halle.de) and Dr Zoe Thomas (z.thomas@bham.ac.uk). Please email both organisers by this date with a rough title and a document of approximately 250 words about what you would like to discuss at the workshop. We are currently applying for funding for travel and accommodation for participants. Please let us know if you require this to attend. We are also hoping to make elements of the workshop hybrid, although in person attendance is preferred.

Call for papers: Technological Optimism in 1970s and 1980s Popular Culture: Innovation, Creativity, Prosperity, and Freedom

 Call for papers: Technological Optimism in 1970s and 1980s Popular Culture: Innovation, Creativity, Prosperity, and Freedom - Mainz 04/2026


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


This conference seeks to explore the cultural and intellectual roots of technological optimism in the 1970s and 1980s, decades that tend to be better known for their pervasive undercurrents of pessimism about threats to the natural environment and human well-being. Nonetheless, significant technological advances continued, and transformative visions of progress gained traction, paving the way for the techno-utopianism of the 1990s. We aim to examine how the popular culture and creative expression of the era captured and amplified positive beliefs in technology’s power to foster innovation, creativity, prosperity and freedom.


Technological Optimism in 1970s and 1980s Popular Culture: Innovation, Creativity, Prosperity, and Freedom

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

John C. Wood / Thorsten Wübbena (Leibniz Institute of European History) (Leibniz Institute of European History, Mainz), 55116 Mainz (Deutschland)

15.04.2026 - 17.04.2026

Bewerbungsschluss: 11.09.2025


We invite scholars, historians, technologists and cultural critics to submit papers addressing the historical and cultural dimensions of technological optimism during this pivotal era.


Debates surrounding technology’s place in our lives are highly polarised. Its critics highlight the dangers and crises technology brings: climate change, pervasive surveillance, ever-deadlier weapons, behavioural manipulation and an alleged dehumanisation in work and private life. At the same time, there are many vehement assertions of technology’s transformative and liberating potential, whether as a solution to environmental crisis, a way to extend human possibility, a vehicle for individual expression or simply as an engine of progress generally.


While technology itself is constantly changing, the topics that it raises — and even the language in which it is debated — are far from new. Through this conference, we aim to explore the historical roots of present discussions, focusing on the 1970s and 1980s and issues such as:


- Why did optimistic beliefs in technology thrive despite the challenges of the time?

- What strategies did techno-optimists use to counter the arguments of technological pessimism?

- How did technological optimism build upon previous developments and/or shape the development of subsequent innovations?


We encourage papers that situate technological optimism within this broader historial context, connecting the period’s cultural, political, and social currents to its technological innovations.


We also hope to account for the complex geographic landscape of technological optimism and thus welcome contributions that address, for example, visions of technological optimism behind the Iron Curtain or those to be found beyond Europe and North America in the period in question. 


More detailed information about the conference’s themes, aims and topics is available at its website: https://ieg-dhr.github.io/techno_optimism/


Please submit an abstract by 11.09.2025 of no more than 500 words (references  excluded) to the organisers at digital@ieg-mainz.de for a 20-minute presentation (plus discussion), clearly  outlining your proposed paper’s focus, methodology, and relevance to the  conference theme. Include your name, institutional affiliation, and contact information with your abstract.

Call for papers: Archives of Migration. Participation, Knowledge Production and Collaboration

 Call for papers:

Archives of Migration. Participation, Knowledge Production and Collaboration

Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), in cooperation with the Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the Innsbruck University, 110 00 Praha 1 (Czech Republic)

01.12.2025 - 02.12.2025

Deadline, September 1, 2025.

URL: https://www.leibniz-gwzo.de/sites/default/files/dateien/CfP_ArchivesOfMigration-2.pdf

Thursday, 3 July 2025

Izabela Mrzygłód: Uniwersytety w cieniu kryzysu. Nacjonalistyczna radykalizacja studentów Warszawy i Wiednia w okresie międzywojennym

 Izabela Mrzygłód: Uniwersytety w cieniu kryzysu. Nacjonalistyczna radykalizacja studentów Warszawy i Wiednia w okresie międzywojennym [Universities in the shadow of a crisis: Nationalist radicalisation of students in Warsaw and Vienna in the Interwar period]. Wydawnictwo UMK 2025. ISBN:978-83-231-6067-0, DOI:https://doi.org/10.12775/978-83-231-6068-7.


Uniwersytety w cieniu kryzysu. Nacjonalistyczna radykalizacja studentów Warszawy i Wiednia w okresie międzywojennym to krytyczne spojrzenie na przeszłość dwóch uczelni Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej. Autorka stawia pytanie o powód, dla którego to właśnie studenci zostali awangardą nacjonalistycznych rewolucji. Analizuje praktyki i dyskursy skrajnej prawicy, której rola rosła na polskich i austriackich uniwersytetach w międzywojniu. Wykorzystując historyczne źródła i socjologiczną wyobraźnię, sięga do emocji i aspiracji „zwykłych akademików”. Pokazuje, jak organizacje samopomocowe przekształcały się w agendy antysemityzmu, jak kultura polityczna młodych naznaczona została przemocą, a brutalne ataki na żydowskich studentów i profesorów stały się codziennością. Śledzi, jak radykalna mniejszość była coraz głośniejsza i skutecznie przyciągała milczącą większość, a postulaty wykluczenia Żydów ze wspólnoty narodowej trafiły do głównego nurtu, żeby w końcu stać się oficjalną polityką rektoratów wprowadzających getto ławkowe. Praca przybliża atmosferę kryzysu i fascynację faszyzmem, ukazuje chronologię przemocy, bada nacjonalistyczne rytuały i symbole. Zestawienie szerokiej europejskiej perspektywy z historią w skali mikro daje nowe spojrzenie na II Rzeczpospolitą, I Republikę Austriacką i prawicowy radykalizm, nie tylko międzywojenny.

Wednesday, 2 July 2025

Guilherme Fians, Bernhard Struck, and Claire Taylor: Postcards, Translators and Esperanto Pioneers. An Alternative History of International Communication

 Guilherme Fians, Bernhard Struck, and Claire Taylor: Postcards, Translators and Esperanto Pioneers. An Alternative History of International Communication. University of London Press 2025. ISBN: 9781914477881


Esperanto has a rich and multifaceted history. Yet little is known about how ordinary Esperanto speakers used the language in its early decades. What happened to a language, created in a specific time and context, when it travelled to different places and contexts? At a time when steamships, international postal services and the telephone were setting the pace of the early twentieth century’s wave of globalisation, what role did languages play in this increasingly international and internationalist scenario?

This book begins to answer these questions by examining the archives of John Beveridge (1857–1943), a Scottish clergyman who became the founder of the Scottish Esperanto Federation and a key figure in this transnational speech community. It delves into Beveridge’s numerous letters and postcards to show how he made use of this constructed language to build transnational networks across Europe.

The book is also the first to focus on women in a constructed language movement and discusses how Beveridge’s daughters, Lois and Heather, played core roles through attending international Esperanto conferences and translating books into Esperanto. In exploring how the Beveridge family mobilised Esperanto as an internationalist tool, the book shows how languages and media help shape the ways in which we build our worlds through words, providing an alternative, “marginal” approach to early twentieth-century globalisation.

Sunday, 15 June 2025

Conference report: Russia’s Politics of Truth and its Quest for Alliance in the Global South

 Lilú Kruspe / Sascha R. Harnisch, Conference report: Russia’s Politics of Truth and its Quest for Alliance in the Global South, in: H-Soz-Kult, 12.06.2025, https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/fdkn-155611.

Wednesday, 11 June 2025

CFP: « Protect and Control. The Politics of Uncertainty and Danger in the Soviet Union (Second Half of the Twentieth Century) »

 Dear colleagues, 

We are pleased to announce the call for papers for the workshop entitled « Protect and Control. The Politics of Uncertainty and Danger in the Soviet Union (Second Half of the Twentieth Century) » to be held on April 16 and 17, 2026 at the Maison Française in Oxford.

URL: https://www.hsozkult.de/event/id/event-154313

While being less spectacular than terror and repression, the Soviet state’s efforts to protect the population from uncertainty and dangers were also instrumental for reshaping the relationship between state and society. Constructing an unforeseen event or danger as a social problem, taking protective measures and determining the conditions to compensate victims and anticipating the future – this is how we characterise the ‘politics of uncertainty and danger’. This workshop aims to clarify the paradox whereby the regime was attacked by the Soviets on the basis of its inability to protect them, despite its having reaffirmed its protective nature by implementing security measures.


This workshop aims to produce a collective publication in English and article proposals are expected by 15 June 2025.


Best regards,


Katja Doose, Grégory Dufaud, Anna Safronova


Darya Tsymbalyuk: Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia's War.

 Darya Tsymbalyuk: Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia's War. Polity press 2025. ISBN: 9781509562497. 

URL: https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=ecocide-in-ukraine-the-environmental-cost-of-russias-war--9781509562497


Russia’s war on Ukraine has not only destroyed millions of human lives, it has also been catastrophic for the environment. Forests and fields have been burned to the ground, animal and plant species pushed to the brink of extinction, soil and water contaminated with oil products, debris, and mines.  On a single day in June 2023, the breached Kakhovka Dam flooded thousands of kilometres of protected natural habitat, as well as villages, towns, and agricultural land. The devastation of biodiversity and ecosystems across Ukraine has been immeasurable, long-lasting and its consequences stretch beyond national borders.

 

In this poignant book, Ukrainian researcher Darya Tsymbalyuk offers an intimate portrait of her beloved homeland against the backdrop of Russia’s war and ecocide. In elegant and moving prose, she describes the damage to the country’s rivers, the grasslands of the steppes, animals, insects, and colonies of birds, as a result of Russia’s ground and air operations.  Alongside the everyday experiences of people in Ukraine living with the environmental consequences of the war, we share Tsymbalyuk’s own reckoning with the changing nature of cherished places and the loss of familiar worlds caused by the ongoing Russian invasion.

Sunday, 8 June 2025

Н. С. Калинин (ed..) Математики Санкт-Петербурга и их открытия.

 Н. С. Калинин (ed..) Математики Санкт-Петербурга и их открытия. Сборник статей [St. Petersburg Mathematicians and their Discoveries. Collection of Articles]. МЦНМО 2025. ISBN: 978-5-4439-1917-1


В книге рассказаны биографии 45 математиков, чья жизнь и/или работа была тесно связана с Санкт-Петербургом-Петроградом-Ленинградом. Большая часть биографий снабжена рассказами о научных достижениях их героев. Для широкого круга читателей.

Wednesday, 4 June 2025

Medicina antiqua, mediaevalis et moderna

 Lucyna Kostuch, Sylwia Konarska-Zimnicka, Beata Wojciechowska red., Medicina antiqua, mediaevalis et moderna. Historia – filozofia – religia (IV), 2025, 421 s.

Publikacja prezentuje wybrane aspekty badań nad medycyną starożytną, średniowieczną i nowożytną, uwidaczniając dziedzictwo historyczne w tym zakresie i wpływy kulturowe dostrzegalne zarówno w czasie jak i przestrzeni. Opracowanie zawiera teksty dotyczące historii medycyny europejskiej, w tym polskiego dorobku na przestrzeni dziejów. Wieloautorska monografia przedstawia badania w obszarze historii medycyny, które łączą elementów dorobku różnych dyscyplin nauki: medycyny, przyrodoznawstwa, historii, historii nauki, historii religii, historii sztuki, filozofii, teologii, filologii i archeologii. W publikacji analizie poddano liczne zagadnienia badawcze: medyczne właściwości przyrody; opisane w świadectwach źródłowych: choroby kobiece, męskie i dziecięce; choroby psychiczne; choroby i metody leczenia utrwalone w literaturze różnych gatunków, zachowane traktaty i teorie medyczne; kwestia statusu lekarza w różnych epokach historycznych, znani lekarze w dziejach; choroby sławnych postaci historycznych; rozwój szpitalnictwa; astrologia medyczna; wpływ klimatu na stan zdrowia człowieka, medyczne praktyki magiczne; epidemie.

Spis treści

WPROWADZENIE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    7

ANNA MARIA WAJDA – Oczyszczające i lecznicze właściwości wody w świetle tekstów biblijnych i pozabiblijnych. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

LUCYNA KOSTUCH – Koper, wąż i antyczna medycyna. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

TATIANA KRYNICKA – Izydor z Sewilli o medycynie (Etymologie, księga IV). . . . 49

KAROL ZDZIECH – Metafory o charakterze medycznym w listach papieża Grzegorza VII. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

MATEUSZ FITAS – Zabiegi medyczne w świetle arabskiego traktatu Albucasisa (936–1013). Współczesny komentarz medyczny. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

BEATA WOJCIECHOWSKA – O zachowaniu lekarza w świetle dwunastowiecznego traktatu z Salerno . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

ANNA GŁUSIUK – Mistrz Bernardus Provincialis o afrodyzjakach, anafrodyzjakach, sposobach na niepłodność i środkach stosowanych

podczas porodu w traktacie pod tytułem Commentarium super tabulas Salerni. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

KRZYSZTOF RATAJCZAK – Szpitalnictwo w zakonie świętego Jana Jerozolimskiego w średniowieczu. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

JERZY RAJMAN – Lekarze krakowscy (1278–1400). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

ZOFIA WILK-WOŚ – Medyk o medykach. Lekarze w dziele Chronica Polonorum Macieja z Miechowa. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171

SYLWIA KONARSKA-ZIMNICKA, MATEUSZ FITAS – Wątki jatromatematyczne w Introductorium astrologie compendiosum Wacława z Krakowa . . . . . . . . . 189

PIOTR KARDYŚ – Inkunabuły „medyczne” w zbiorze inkunabułów  biblioteki PAU i PAN w Krakowie. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203

KATARZYNA JUSTYNIARSKA-CHOJAK – Traktaty medyczne w księgozbiorach mieszczańskich (w świetle inwentarzy pośmiertnych z XVI–XVIII wieku). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

MAŁGORZATA KRZYSZTOFIK – Infirmaria chrześcijańska Mikołaja z Mościsk (1624). Dyskurs medyczny i religijny. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235

JACEK PIELAS – Sadyzm i choroba umysłowa w środowisku magnackim dawnej Rzeczypospolitej. Casus Warszyckich herbu Awdaniec w XVII wieku. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247

ANNA SZYLAR – „Na ukąszenie żmii i psa wściekłego” – receptury na medykamenty wyrabiane domowym sposobem (druga połowa XVIII wieku) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265

TADEUSZ SROGOSZ – Receptury Karla Franza Heintza w czasie 

 epidemii dżumy w latach 1780–1781. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283

TOMASZ CIESIELSKI – Służby medyczno-sanitarne w armiach Rzeczypospolitej w czasach saskich. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295

MARIUSZ NOWAK – Wykorzystanie wód termalnych do celów leczniczych w spiskim uzdrojowisku Vyšnie Ružbachy w XIX–XX wieku (do 1939 roku) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319

SARAH TAYLOR-JASKÓLSKA – Od „zdrowego” rozsądku do wiedzy medycznej: zdrowie publiczne w wiktoriańskiej Anglii. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337

KAMIL SZPUNAR – Obraz szydłowieckiej apteki w świetle  dokumentów z pierwszej połowy XIX wieku . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347

MARTA KŁAK-AMBROŻKIEWICZ – Emocje, choroby i sposoby leczenia – z życia artysty Jana Matejki. Pierś pelikana. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371

PAWEŁ PRYT – „Co do mego zdrowia…” – wyjazdy do uzdrowisk rodziny Wielopolskich w XIX oraz pierwszej w połowie XX wieku. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 383

JERZY GAPYS, FILIP ŁOBODA – Epidemia tyfusu plamistego w więzieniu kieleckim w latach 1918–1919. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395

VARIA

MICHAŁ M. SKOCZYLAS – Wyrazy pamięci o dawnych medykach i ich dorobek naukowy w ofercie turystycznej polskich miast i wsi – stan obecny i propozycje rozwoju . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 409


Sunday, 1 June 2025

Medicine on a Larger Scale: Global Histories of Social Medicine

 Lie, Anne Kveim, Jeremy A. Greene, and Warwick Anderson, eds. Medicine on a Larger Scale: Global Histories of Social Medicine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025. ISBN: 9781009428514. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009428514. Open access.


Book description

In a world of growing health inequity and ecological injustice, how do we revitalize medicine and public health to tackle new problems? This groundbreaking collection draws together case studies of social medicine in the Global South, radically shifting our understanding of social science in healthcare. Looking beyond a narrative originating in nineteenth-century Europe, a team of expert contributors explores a far broader set of roots and branches, with nodes in Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, Oceania, the Middle East, and Asia. This plural approach reframes and decolonizes the study of social medicine, highlighting connections to social justice and health equity, social science and state formation, bottom-up community initiatives, grassroots movements, and an array of revolutionary sensibilities. As a truly global history, this book offers a more usable past to imagine a new politics of social medicine for medical professionals and healthcare workers worldwide. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Reviews

‘Medicine on a Larger Scale offers multiple visions of social medicine as an idea, field of research and teaching, form of practice, critique of health policy, and approach to the Planet’s problems. This intriguing and useful collection also places social medicine in a truly global context and gives voice to social medicine traditions form the South that are less well-known than the stories it also presents from Euro-American history. A step forward in imagining a counter-biomedicine that can better connect social suffering and healing with interpretive social science, post-colonial imaginings, and some of the more serious problems of the world. Impressive!’

Arthur Kleinman - Harvard University

‘This impressive and timely work brings together contributions from a wide range of scholars to illuminate the historical basis of social medicine. The contributors show us that the lessons are highly relevant to contemporary challenges and why reimagining social medicine in the light of current realities can help to address them.’

Andy Haines - London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

‘This collection of essays is pivotal to understanding the historical urgency of global public health. The political visibility of that urgency is embedded in global histories of social medicine movements that asked what are the social determinants of population health in post-colonial worlds. Collectively these essays powerfully demonstrate the interrogative necessity of historical analysis in order to address crippling global inequalities in health, premature mortality and debilitating morbidities.’

Dorothy Porter - University of California, San Francisco

CFP: Trauma, Institutional Knowledge, and Social Order

 CFP: Trauma, Institutional Knowledge, and Social Order: New Perspectives from Eastern and Western Europe during the Cold War - Graz 12/2025


---------------------


This explorative workshop investigates institutional and praxeological approaches to psychic suffering in Eastern and Western Europe after 1945. It investigates the making of trauma through broad political, ideological, environmental or social transformations in the Cold War period through processes of making visible, pathologization, legitimization, or denial. The workshop seeks to uncover specifically European trajectories in the conceptual and institutional history of 'trauma’.


Trauma, Institutional Knowledge, and Social Order: New Perspectives from Eastern and Western Europe during the Cold War

-------------------

Institute of History, Department of Southeast European History and Anthropology, University of Graz; Institute for the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine, Charité Berlin; German Police University, Münster, 8010 Graz (Austria)

03.12.2025 - 05.12.2025

Bewerbungsschluss: 01.07.2025


How did “trauma” emerge as a therapeutic concept, political discourse, and administrative practice in Europe during the Cold War? How was it treated or silenced, conceptualized or classified? What role did psychiatric diagnoses, forensic reports, police investigations, and bureaucratic procedures play in shaping societal responses to events such as political violence, armed conflicts, displacement, natural catastrophes, epidemics, or other structural forms of harm?


This explorative workshop investigates institutional and praxeological approaches to psychic suffering in Eastern and Western Europe after 1945. It investigates the making of trauma through broad political, ideological, environmental or social transformations in the Cold War period through processes of making visible, pathologization, legitimization, or denial. Moving beyond studies focused solely on World War II and its long-term psychological consequences, we aim to understand the Cold War as a period of continued upheaval, producing new institutional responses to psychic distress while shaped by the legacies of previous violence. In doing so, the workshop seeks to uncover specifically European trajectories in the conceptual and institutional history of 'trauma’.


The workshop focuses on institutional archives and documentary sources - psychiatric and therapeutic case files, forensic assessments, hospital records, bureaucratic documents, police files, and court proceedings. These materials reveal how societies perceived, managed, and classified mental suffering - or failed to do so - under specific historical conditions. We engage with recent historiographical debates that challenge the simplistic East–West dichotomy. The assumption that Western societies openly addressed psychic suffering while the East repressed it has proven increasingly inadequate. Instead, evidence suggests that similar diagnostic and administrative frameworks were in place across both systems until around 1980, with mental suffering often recognized only when considered temporary and treatable. Diagnoses such as “superficial neurosis” in Yugoslavia or “gross stress reaction” in the DSM-I exemplify these limitations in collective recognition.


We invite contributions based on institutional sources that examine how psychic distress was defined, regulated, or marginalized in diverse national and political contexts across Europe during the Cold War.


Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

- Psychiatric, legal, and other administrative approaches to psychic suffering in Eastern and Western Europe

- Diagnostic strategies: between pathologization and normalization, acknowledgement and ignorance

- Forensic reports, police files, and psychiatric records as sources for the history of trauma

- The relationship between political repression, mental distress, and medical classification

- Social, gender, environmental, health, and economic dimensions of the (non-)recognition of psychic vulnerability

- Institutional logics in addressing war trauma, imprisonment-related suffering, and structural violence

- Interactions between medical knowledge, administrative practices, and norms of psychological normalcy


Date: 3–5 December 2025

Location: University of Graz, Institute of History


We plan to circulate working papers beforehand to allow for in-depth discussion and exchange during the workshop. The workshop language is English. Travel and accommodation costs will be covered.


Submission:

Please send your abstract (max. 300 words) and a short biographical note (max. 150 words) by 1 July 2025 to:

heike.karge@uni-graz.at

Notification of acceptance: by 15 July 2025.

Deadline for paper submission: 3 November 2025.


The Global Campus: Academic Fiction in World Literature

 World Literature Studies 1/2025 “The Global Campus: Academic Fiction in World Literature / Globálny kampus: akademická fikcia vo svetovej literatúre”EDITORIÁL/EDITORIAL

Open access: https://www.sav.sk/?lang=sk&doc=journal-list&part=list_articles&journal_issue_no=11117582


Blashkiv, O.: The global campus: Academic fiction in world literature. (s. 2)

ŠTÚDIE/ARTICLES

Moseley, M.: Globalism, then and now: The rise of international neoliberalism and the academic novel. (s. 3)

Blashkiv, O.: Central European perspectives of the global campus: Slavic academic fiction after 1989. (s. 16)

Gaidash, A.: Aging professors: Reading transatlantic academic plays of the 1990s. (s. 30)

Perkowska-Gawlik, E.: The academic murder mystery as a popular subgenre from the Polish perspective. (s. 41)

Hrtánek, P.: The campus novel and university satire in recent Czech literature. (s. 56)

Selejan, C.: Magical realism and the othering of the academic in three Romanian postcommunist novels. (s. 71)

Koval, M.: The American university in the aftermath of 9/11 in Susan Choi’s novel A Person of Interest. (s. 85)

Anténe, P.: “The inhospitable city”: A Spanish view of Oxford in Javier Marías’s All Souls. (s. 97)

Šedíková Čuhová, P. - Kubealaková, M.: The Perlmann crisis of the academic world. (s. 109)

Mengel, E.: The university as heterotopia in Tabea Mußgnug’s Nächstes Semester wird alles anders.... (s. 123)

Hansen, J.: A tale of two professions in the Swedish campus novel Vård, skola och omsorg. (s. 137)

MATERIÁLY/MATERIALS

Kirova, M.: The phenomenon of the “Professorenroman” in Bulgarian literature. (s. 147)

RECENZIE/BOOK REVIEWS

Gáfrik, R.: SHUNQING CAO – PEINA ZHUANG: A New Introduction to Comparative Literature: From a Sinitic Perspective. (s. 157)

Bžoch, A.: Anton Vydra: Hermés bez krídel. Kultúrne obrazy kontinentálnej hermeneutiky [Hermes without wings. Cultural images of continental hermeneutics]. (s. 159)

Janiec-Nyitrai, A.: Miloš Zelenka: Central Europe in Symbolic and Literary Geography. (s. 161)

Ružbaská, A.: Ivana Kupková: Cesty k „novej“ ruskej literatúre v slovenských prekladoch po roku 1989 [Paths to “new” Russian literature in Slovak translations after 1989]. (s. 164)

Wednesday, 28 May 2025

ESEH online seminar "Hooked: A History of the Black Sea in Six Animals" on June 5

 ESEH online seminar "Hooked: A History of the Black Sea in Six Animals" on June 5


The time has come for the last seminar of the 2024-2025 season. On June 5, 16:00 CET, Taylor Zajicek will give a talk “Hooked: A History of the Black Sea in Six Animals” with Constantin Ardeleanu as a discussant. Please see the information below.

Presenter: Taylor Zajicek (Columbia University)

Discussant: Constantin Ardeleanu (Institute for South-East European Studies/New Europe College)

Chair and organizer: Anna Mazanik (Max Weber Network Eastern Europe)

Thursday, June 5, 16:00 CET

Abstract: What makes a region? Historians have different ideas. For many, a region is a cluster of cultural, linguistic, and historical traits. Others point to commerce, or geography. But what happens when these networks break down—or when the ecology itself changes? This talk will introduce one such region in flux: the Black Sea. It will trace the Black Sea’s evolution, as both a geopolitical and physical space, through its history of fishing. More specifically, the presentation will explore the interaction of six kinds of animals: three fish, one marine mammal, an invasive comb jelly, and us. Aquatic wildlife shaped the diets and cultures of the Black Sea’s humans for millennia. Yet in recent centuries, these creatures acquired new economic, scientific, and diplomatic significance—with immense (and eventually catastrophic) consequences for the Black Sea environment. This ESEH seminar will reconstruct this historical arc, from the Greek colonies of Antiquity to the competitive industrialization of the 1930s, to the environmental diplomacy of the Cold War. The presentation (based on fieldwork in Italy, Romania, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, and the US) will conclude with a discussion of the Black Sea’s ongoing precarity, as a home and battlefield.

Taylor Zajicek is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian, and East Europe Studies. His first book project—Black Sea, Cold War—explores the intersection of geopolitics, science, and environmental change in the modern Black Sea region. The manuscript builds on his Princeton University dissertation, which won the Oxford University Press USA Prize for international history in 2024. Fieldwork for this project was sponsored by multiple institutions, including the Fulbright-Hays Program, Social Science Research Council, and American Research Institute in Turkey. In summer 2025, Zajicek will join the Williams College History Department as an assistant professor.

Constantin Ardeleanu  is a research fellow at the Institute for South-East European Studies of the Romanian Academy and at the New Europe College in Bucharest. He specializes in the history of the Black Sea region over the last two centuries. His most recent monograph, Steamboat Modernity: Travel, Transport, and Social Transformation on the Lower Danube, 1830–1860, was published by CEU Press in 2024.

Please register to get the Zoom link https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1b2Np1YI2uST0YbKhQ3XjxxbVYlvSxUx0635WIr74CnE/edit

The link will be send on the day event. Sometimes the emails with the link end up in the spam folder or are rejected by the mailing system. If you do not get the link one hour before the meeting, please write to Anna Mazanik directly anna.mazanik@mws-osteuropa.org

hps.cesee article alert

 Mattes, Johannes, and Cécile Philippe. “Crossing Boundaries, Forging Unity: Nuclear Medicine and Science Diplomacy in Cold War Europe.” The British Journal for the History of Science, 2025, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087425000317.

Ličen, Daša. “Against ‘Plebeian Ignorance’ and for ‘Civilized Behavior’: Habsburg Trieste’s Società Zoofila as a Bourgeois Instrument.” Austrian History Yearbook, 2025, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0067237825000207.

Juhászová, Tereza. “Teachers in Power: Nation-Building and Loyalty in a Czechoslovak Periphery (1918–1947).” Contemporary European History, 2025, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777325000153.

Wacław Pagórski: Die Allgemeine Weltbeschreibung von Cosmus von Simmer (1581–1650): Zum Bestand und zum Wert eines vergessenen kosmografischen Werkes, Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 1/2025, S. 1–29. https://doi.org/10.25627/202574111610

online conference: Felix Klein on the centenary of his death

 online conference: Felix Klein on the centenary of his death. The Master and his students. 4 June 2025, 11:00–19:35 (Online/ ZOOM)


Conference on 125th anniversary of the award of an honorary doctorate to Felix Klein by the Jagiellonian University (7 June 2025) and on the centenary of his death (22 June 2025) 

Poster: https://www.ihnpan.pl/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Klein_2025-06-04.pdf

Program: https://www.ihnpan.pl/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Klein_2025-06-04_program.pdf

 Abstracts: https://www.ihnpan.pl/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/abstrakty-i-biografie-prelegentow-Klein.pdf

Sunday, 25 May 2025

Call for papers: The Moralization of Science

Call for papers: The Moralization of Science

Sep 17, 2026 - Sep 18, 2026


Conference at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna (Austria) | Conveners: Daniel Brewing, Moritz Fischer, Elke Seefried (RWTH Aachen), Alexander Bogner (Austrian Academy of Sciences), Axel Jansen (GHI Washington)



Warnings against moralization are a common theme in discourses about the sciences and the humanities. Moralization introduces a dichotomy of good and evil, which, from an epistemic perspective, constitutes an impermissible simplification of complex relationships and, from a social perspective, contributes to the entrenchment of conflicts. Ultimately, it transforms the opposing party into an enemy against whom one’s own values must be asserted with full force. Warnings against moralization assume that both truth and social peace are endangered by it—and that it is others who engage in moralizing.


However, moralization can also yield positive effects, as illustrated by the rise of bioethics. To the extent that advances in the life sciences have been interpreted as profound moral challenges, bioethics has undergone institutionalization and professionalization from the 1960s onward. Concern for moral standards in scientific practice has contributed to the further development of research ethics. In this way, ethics has evolved into the most visible subdiscipline of philosophy. Thus, moralization can function as a driving force in the differentiation of research fields. At times, moralization originated from within academia itself. One example from the early postwar period is political science, which understood itself as an instrument for promoting liberal democracy. In response to the crimes of National Socialism, political education and academic reform in Germany sought to prevent future abuses. Similar debates emerged globally, for example, in the U.S. after Hiroshima, and in Japan through anti-nuclear movements. Another example is environmental and climate science: After the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, scientific efforts to contribute to ecological transformation intensified. Environmental and climate sciences serve the cause of sustainability and, among other things, advance the moralization of markets and consumption. The fact that contemporary surveys indicate declining trust in climate science due to its perceived proximity to politics suggests that science can also fall victim to its own moralization.


When it comes to moralization, science does not merely function as a subject or object of such processes. Scientific knowledge itself can serve as a resource in processes of moralization. Relevant examples are value conflicts, which often revolve around the question of who the “true” victims are. Consider the controversy over stem cell research during the 2000s: Are the true victims the patients who are denied access to a potential stem cell therapy due to insufficient research funding or the embryos that are used and consumed for research purposes? In such disputes, the ability to prevail depends, among other things, on the possession of relevant scientific expertise.


This outline highlights the intricate and multifaceted relationships between science and the humanities, moralization, and victimization. As debated among historians, moralization is an essentially contested concept: diverse actors employ the term—often in opposition to one another—leading to ambiguity regarding its meaning and semantic boundaries. Our conference seeks to address this challenge by exploring the intersection of scholarship and moralization from a historical perspective.


We proceed from the assumption that the interrelationship between moralization and science has become increasingly prominent and visible since 1945. Of course, this issue has been debated in various forms at least since the professionalization and differentiation of the sciences in the late nineteenth century. But in the German-speaking world, the continued relevance of issues discussed in the earlier Werturteilsstreit (debate over value judgments) after World War II and the 1960s Positivismusstreit (debate over positivism) highlighted tensions about the role of critical science in democratic societies. Both debates revolved around the extent to which non-scientific values could or should influence academic discussions and whether a scholar could still claim scientific freedom while advocating for social justice. These lines of conflict persist into the present.


We expect to place particular focus on the period since the 1970s, asking to what extent a specific constellation emerged during this decade that intensified moralizing discourses in science. In Western industrialized countries, the legacy of ‘1968’ and the rise of new social movements prompted a critical reassessment of the role of science amid broader social and cultural transformations, and of the relationship between science and activism. This shift helped catalyze the rise of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and, within the social sciences, a growing emphasis on subjectivity, individual experience, and authenticity. Particularly in Western Europe, ideas of participatory democracy and equality began to permeate not only the social sciences and humanities but also the natural sciences, fostering methods and practices that blurred the boundaries between science, society, and the public sphere. These developments contributed to the emergence of “counter-knowledge” from above (A. von Schwerin) and became a central driver of the growing moralization of science. In the United States, the 1970s likewise saw an intensification of moralizing tendencies, shaped by the decline of the Great Society paradigm in politics, culture, and public life. The rise of neoliberalism signaled a return to an older, historically embedded discourse centered on the individual as a moral agent. Across both sides of the Atlantic, these developments reinforced the moralization of science.


We invite contributions that explore the role of moralization in fields of science, the social sciences, and the humanities, in public discourses fueled by these fields, and in public discussions about them. How is science a driver of moralization and victimization? What conflicts evolve from the moralizing role of science for science itself? What conflicts evolve for societies at large? In short: Under what circumstances and in what historical contexts does science become the subject, object, or resource of moralization—and what are the consequences with respect to awareness of societal problems, political decision-making, and research itself?


Key Questions for Inquiry


We invite contributions from historians, sociologists, and scholars in related fields to present papers that take up questions such as the following:


- In what ways have discourses and practices of moralization been interconnected in the history of science and the humanities? What roles have they played in stabilizing or challenging paradigms and disciplinary communities? How have these discourses and practices changed over time?

- To what extent has moralization contributed to scientific self-reflection and progress? Conversely, to what extent has it posed a threat to the scientific ethos and to adherence to norms of truth-seeking?

- Who has engaged in moralization, who has accused others of doing so, and to what end? What cultural, political, or economic contexts have shaped these dynamics?

- What role have methodological problems played in advancing or hindering moralization within scientific and humanistic fields?

- What resources has science contributed to public debates on “political correctness” or critiques of historical injustice? How have the humanities drawn on science in these contexts, and what roles have scientists themselves chosen to adopt—or avoid—in academic and public discourse?

- We are also interested in the impact of different forms and practices of communication: How should we evaluate the role of intermediaries such as journalists? What role does the public play in shaping or responding to moralizing discourses?

- Potential topics include (but are not limited to) nuclear technology, environmental science, the AIDS crisis, and biomedical ethics in the 1980s and 1990s. While the sciences offer particularly rich ground for analysis, we also welcome papers on moralizing discourses in the social sciences and the humanities.


The conference will bring together scholars from diverse fields, including history (such as the history of science or medicine), sociology, and science studies, as well as related disciplines. The conveners aim to publish contributions to this conference as a special issue in a peer-reviewed journal or (given the interdisciplinary nature of the project) as an edited book.


The conference will be held at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna (Austria) on September 17 and 18, 2026. Please upload a paper proposal in our applicant portal by September 15, 2025. (Please find the link for the applicant portal in the CFP published on the GHI website, at https://www.ghi-dc.org/events/event/date/the-moralization-of-science.) A proposal consisting of a single PDF-file containing a brief description of the research project (up to 300 words), a brief CV (1 or 2 pages), and contact information. Successful applicants will be notified in October 2025.


Accommodation will be arranged and paid for by the conference organizers. Participants will make their own travel arrangements; funding subsidies for travel may be available upon request for selected scholars, especially those who might not otherwise be able to attend the conference, including junior scholars and scholars from universities with limited resources.


Kontakt

For further information regarding the event’s format and conceptualization, please contact Axel Jansen (a.jansen@ghi-dc.org). For questions about the submission platform or logistics (travel and accommodation), please contact our event coordinator Nicola Hofstetter (hofstetter-phelps@ghi-dc.org).


Saturday, 24 May 2025

ESEH online seminar "Hooked: A History of the Black Sea in Six Animals" on June 5


The time has come for the last seminar of the 2024-2025 season. On June 5, 16:00 CET, Taylor Zajicek will give a talk “Hooked: A History of the Black Sea in Six Animals” with Constantin Ardeleanu as a discussant. Please see the information below.

Presenter: Taylor Zajicek (Columbia University)

Discussant: Constantin Ardeleanu (Institute for South-East European Studies/New Europe College)

Chair and organizer: Anna Mazanik (Max Weber Network Eastern Europe)

Thursday, June 5, 16:00 CET

Abstract: What makes a region? Historians have different ideas. For many, a region is a cluster of cultural, linguistic, and historical traits. Others point to commerce, or geography. But what happens when these networks break down—or when the ecology itself changes? This talk will introduce one such region in flux: the Black Sea. It will trace the Black Sea’s evolution, as both a geopolitical and physical space, through its history of fishing. More specifically, the presentation will explore the interaction of six kinds of animals: three fish, one marine mammal, an invasive comb jelly, and us. Aquatic wildlife shaped the diets and cultures of the Black Sea’s humans for millennia. Yet in recent centuries, these creatures acquired new economic, scientific, and diplomatic significance—with immense (and eventually catastrophic) consequences for the Black Sea environment. This ESEH seminar will reconstruct this historical arc, from the Greek colonies of Antiquity to the competitive industrialization of the 1930s, to the environmental diplomacy of the Cold War. The presentation (based on fieldwork in Italy, Romania, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, and the US) will conclude with a discussion of the Black Sea’s ongoing precarity, as a home and battlefield.

Taylor Zajicek is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian, and East Europe Studies. His first book project—Black Sea, Cold War—explores the intersection of geopolitics, science, and environmental change in the modern Black Sea region. The manuscript builds on his Princeton University dissertation, which won the Oxford University Press USA Prize for international history in 2024. Fieldwork for this project was sponsored by multiple institutions, including the Fulbright-Hays Program, Social Science Research Council, and American Research Institute in Turkey. In summer 2025, Zajicek will join the Williams College History Department as an assistant professor.

Constantin Ardeleanu  is a research fellow at the Institute for South-East European Studies of the Romanian Academy and at the New Europe College in Bucharest. He specializes in the history of the Black Sea region over the last two centuries. His most recent monograph, Steamboat Modernity: Travel, Transport, and Social Transformation on the Lower Danube, 1830–1860, was published by CEU Press in 2024.

Please register to get the Zoom link https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1b2Np1YI2uST0YbKhQ3XjxxbVYlvSxUx0635WIr74CnE/edit

The link will be send on the day event. Sometimes the emails with the link end up in the spam folder or are rejected by the mailing system. If you do not get the link one hour before the meeting, please write to Anna Mazanik directly anna.mazanik@mws-osteuropa.org

Wednesday, 21 May 2025

Jawad Daheur and Iva Lučić (eds.): Habsburg Natures

 Jawad Daheur and Iva Lučić (eds.): Habsburg Natures. Imperial Governance and Environment in Central Europe, 1850-1918. New York: Berghahn 2025. ISBN  978-1-83695-227-5 (available for preorder)

Description

Within the Habsburg Empire of the late nineteenth century, nature became a central focus of political, economic, and scientific attention. A source of valuable natural resources and a platform for consolidating wider, territorial rule, its management and control was subsumed into a broader system of imperial governance. In this exacting analysis of the correlation between the environment and power, Habsburg Natures explores how the natural world fundamentally shaped the political and economic landscape within the Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1850 to 1918. Ranging from forestry and coal-mining to river politics and natural disasters, this volume spotlights how deeply intertwined the histories of environmentalism and empire are.


Contents


Introduction: Towards the Writing of an Environmentally Inspired History of the Late Habsburg Empire

Jawad Daheur and Iva Lučić

Part I: (Inter/Intra) Imperial Entanglements

Chapter 1. Riparian Rivalries and River Politics: How the Danube Question Influenced Diplomatic Relations and Domestic Policies in the Late Habsburg Monarchy

Robert Shields Mevissen

Chapter 2. Improving Landscapes, Peoples and the Habsburg Empire: A Cooperative History of Melioration

Jana Osterkamp

Chapter 3. Logging the Borderlands: Transborder Forest Conflicts and Contestations in the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires in the Nineteenth Century

Selçuk Dursun

Part II: Cooperation and Conflict

Chapter 4. Natural Resources as the Empire’s (Dis)integrative Force: The Case of Bosnian Timber Exports in the Late Habsburg Empire

Iva Lučić

Chapter 5. Get Out of Our Forest! Rural Societies, National Mobilization, State-Building and Modern Forestry in Late-Habsburg and Post-Habsburg Transylvania

Gábor Egry

Chapter 6. The Demilitarization of the Croatian-Slavonian Military Border as an Example of Imperial State Forest Management

Robert Skenderović

Part III: Engineering Nature

Chapter 7. A Natural History of the Global Habsburg Empire: Indian Mongooses and the Production, Circulation and Management of Animal Knowledge in the Adriatic Periphery

Wolfgang Göderle

Chapter 8. The Golden Age of the Bark Beetle: Aristocratic Landowners, Imperial Governance and the Ips typographus in the Šumava Region (1868–1876)

Kristýna Kaucká

Part IV: Managing Resources

Chapter 9. Resource Governance in Time of Drought: Conflicts over Fodder Exports in Austria-Hungary at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Jawad Daheur

Chapter 10. Fuelling the Diversity: A Regional Perspective on Coal in the Late Austro-Hungarian Empire

Ségolène Plyer

Chapter 11. The Industrialization of Forests: The 1852 Imperial Forest Act as an Intervention Towards a Modern Forest Regime

Simone Gingrich and Martin Schmid

Conclusion: Late Habsburg History Revisited

Jawad Daheur and Iva Lučić


Jawad Daheur is a senior researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), focusing on economic and environmental history. His main interest is the interaction between human societies and nature in nineteenth-century Central Europe, with a particular focus on the German-speaking regions (Prussia, Austria-Hungary) and Poland. His recent publications include a special issue of Global Environment, entitled ‘Extractive Peripheries in Europe: Quest for Resources and Changing Environments (15th-20th centuries)’ (2022), and the article ‘Cheap Labour on the Timber Frontier: Migration of Forestry Workers from Austria-Hungary to Southeast Europe, ca. 1880–1914’ (Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte 2024).

Iva Lučić is an associate professor of history at Stockholm University and a Pro Futura Scientia Scholar at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies. Previously, she held a postdoctoral position at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and a Linneaus-Palme Fellowship with Kolkata University. Lučićs first and award-winning monograph Im Namen der Nation (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2018) examines the mobilization process for the political elevation of Muslims in Socialist Yugoslavia. Her second monograph, Gebrochenes Brot (Anton Pustet Verlag, 2020), analyzes the role of religion as a social practice among Roman Catholic noblewomen after the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy.

CfP: Discipline and Punish: The Early Modern University Court in Theory and Practice

 Call for Papers: Discipline and Punish: The Early Modern University Court in Theory and Practice University of Limerick, Ireland, 14-15 January 2026 


The internal jurisdictional autonomy of early modern universities represented a significant inheritance from the medieval instruments of academic freedom. The rise of the territorial university as a model curtailed the independence of these institutions rendering them more directly subject to external political actors, a situation that became more pronounced as a consequence of the Reformation. Despite these transformations, the university’s powers of internal oversight and control of its members remained relatively intact. These powers were set out, instituted and sanctioned in charters, statutes and ordinances. The principal instrument through which the powers were asserted was the academic jurisdiction, i.e. the university court. At one level, these arrangements protected university members, ensuring their protection to a certain extent from external legal threat. However, in adhering to the university jurisdiction, the members submitted themselves to its regulating influence. In this forum, students, professors and the cives academici could be arraigned, prosecuted and sanctioned for minor or major acts of deviancy. Thus, the university court and other instruments of institutional authority could play a central role in the disciplining of university members, defining the parameters of and enforcing normative behaviours. This conference seeks to explore the characteristics of these jurisdictional regimes in the early modern period. Paper proposals that address the following themes are especially welcome:

The legal and administrative frameworks of discipline at early modern universities

The characteristics of university courts

Social disciplining and the normative functions of university courts

The pursuit of personal vendettas and factional strife through the instruments of university jurisdiction

The limits and limitations of academic disciplinary regimes

Subversions of academic jurisdiction

The conference is organised as part of the Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland Laureate Award project, Malcontents: Order and Disorder in the Early Modern World of Learning (https://malcontents.hcommons.org/), which is led by Dr Richard Kirwan (University of Limerick).

The conference will take place at the University of Limerick, Ireland from 14-15 January 2026.

Proposals for papers of c. 300 words with a short biography of c. 200 words should be sent to Dr Wouter Kreuze, wouter.kreuze@ul.ie, by 16 June 2025.


Tuesday, 20 May 2025

Call for articles: Encounters in Unexpected Places: Chinese and East-Central European Interactions...

Call for articles: Encounters in Unexpected Places: Chinese and East-Central European Interactions in Peripheral Spaces, 1700-1949

The proposed volume aims to investigate diverse accounts of encounters between Chinese and East-Central Europeans, focusing on interactions outside the major centres typically associated with intercivilizational exchange.

The volume is based on three premises. First, scholars of travel writing emphasize that ‘encounters are as essential to travel as place; they shape and define journeys’ (Mee 2014, 3). Even when travellers themselves write generally about “others”, still their knowledge owed a lot to individual encounters. Yet, despite their importance, depictions of individual interpersonal encounters have not been central to studies of travel writing. Therefore, we invite contributions that examine how Chinese and East-Central Europeans described these cross-cultural interactions and the role such representations played in shaping identity discourses.

Second, while there is a substantial body of scholarship on Western European encounters with the non-European world over the past few centuries – a period when European imperialism was the dominant force in world history – recent years have seen growing interest in studying intercivilizational contacts from a different perspective, namely, by focusing on actors from regions commonly regarded as peripheral. Therefore, we aim to take a closer look at encounters between Chinese and East-Central Europeans. Recent publications have explored this field and may serve as inspiration (Křížová and Malečková 2022; Huigen and Kołodziejczyk 2023; Kałczewiak and Kozłowska 2022; Mrázek 2024), though there is still much to explore.

Third, to investigate the topic of peripherality more deeply, we seek to focus on encounters taking place outside well-known cosmopolitan centres like Paris, Shanghai, Hong Kong, or New York – places traditionally seen as melting pots – and instead shift our attention to small towns, remote villages, country roads, and other locations less commonly associated with multicultural exchange.

We are particularly interested in proposals that move beyond the framework of a single national tradition and engage in a dialogue between European and Asian sources, though we also welcome case studies focusing on the work of individual authors. We welcome analyses of a wide range of sources, including traditional travel accounts, diaries, memoirs, and personal letters, but with an emphasis on real interactions experienced by the authors. Contributors are encouraged to consider the material dimensions of individual encounters as described in their sources and to reflect on the broader aesthetic and ideological meanings these scenes convey. The following questions may serve as a guiding framework: How did authors’ backgrounds influence their encounters and the meanings they ascribed to them? How did the context of the interaction shape the encounter? How did authors navigate cultural differences in diverse realities? How did descriptions of the people they met contribute to the construction of their own identities? What rhetorical devices were used to describe cross-cultural interactions? How often did they achieve genuine understanding, and how?

Practical information

The volume is planned for Anthem Studies in Encounters between Peripheral Region series. Please submit a short abstract (about 300-400 words) with a short biographical note in English

by 31 August 2025 to the editorial team at tewert@shisu.edu.cn and tewert@amu.edu.pl. The editors of the publication will reply with any comments on the proposed topics and guidelines for the preparation of articles within two months. The planned deadline for full article submissions is April 2026.

Quoted literature

Huigen, Siegfried, and Dorota Kołodziejczyk. 2023. East Central Europe Between the Colonial and the Postcolonial in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Siegfried Huigen and Dorota Kołodziejczyk. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kałczewiak, Mariusz, and Magdalena Kozłowska, eds. 2022. The World beyond the West. Perspectives from Eastern Europe. New York: Berghahn.

Křížová, Markéta, and Jitka Malečková, eds. 2022. Central Europe and the Non-European World in the Long 19th Century. Berlin: Frank & Timme.

Mee, Catherine. 2014. Interpersonal Encounters in Contemporary Travel Writing: French and Italian Perspectives. London: Anthem Press.

Mrázek, Jan, ed. 2024. Escaping Kakania: Eastern European Travels in Colonial Southeast Asia. Vienna: Central European University Press.

Editors

Tomasz Ewertowski, Shanghai International Studies University

Chen Yarong, Capital Normal University

Wednesday, 14 May 2025

Call for Papers: Women in Czech Philosophy

Katedra filosofie a dějin přírodních věd PřF UK ve spolupráci s Ústavem pro soudobé dějiny, Filosofickým ústavem a Sociologickým ústavem Akademie věd České republiky všechny srdečně zve k účasti na odborné konferenci Mezi myšlenkou a institucí: ženy v české filosofii 20. století, která se uskuteční ve dnech 2. a 3. září 2025 v Akademickém konferenčním centru, FLÚ AV ČR, Husova 236/4a, Praha 1.


Konference si klade za cíl prozkoumat různorodé role žen ve vývoji a fungování české filosofie minulého století – ať už z hlediska myšlenkového přínosu, institucionálního působení, nebo širších společenských a kulturních souvislostí.


Návrhy příspěvků (abstrakty v rozsahu max. 300 slov) a případné dotazy prosím zasílejte do 13. června 2025 na adresu: zeny.filosofie.2025@gmail.com


Tématické okruhy:

 


Ženy a vzdělanost: role v univerzitním a akademickém prostředí

Zapojení žen do filosofické komunity: instituce a organizace, vědecká činnost

Rekonstrukce filosofického světa: filosofie a přesahy k dalším disciplínám

Proměny filosofie a toho, jak se na ní ženy podílely v kontextu politických a společenských změn


URL: https://natur.cuni.cz/biologie/katedry-a-pracoviste/katedra-filosofie-a-dejin-prirodnich-ved/o-katedre/aktuality/7383-call-for-papers-zeny-v-ceske-filosofii

Екатерина Жарова: Биология в фокусе. Естественные отделения университетов Российской империи (1830–1900).

 Екатерина Жарова: Биология в фокусе. Естественные отделения университетов Российской империи (1830–1900). Новое литературное обозрение 2025...