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