CFP: The Long Shadow of “Ostforschung”: Continuities, Ruptures, Perspectives.

 CFP: The Long Shadow of “Ostforschung”: Continuities, Ruptures, Perspectives. Lüneburg, 08.10.2026

To mark its 25th anniversary, the Nordost Institute will host an international workshop on 8 October 2026 that examines the historical impact of “Ostforschung,” its ideological foundations, and the continuities and ruptures that shape its legacy into the present. The event also explores the political, epistemic, and societal conditions of this knowledge production and invites scholars from various disciplines to contribute their perspectives on the enduring significance of “Ostforschung” in contemporary Eastern European studies.

At the same time, the workshop will reflect on how closely scientific knowledge production , political interests, and social power relations were intertwined within “Ostforschung.” Confronting this past should help to make current research practices more sensitive to their own assumptions and possible distortions.

“Ostforschung” was closely linked to national, imperial, and colonial projects. Its concepts and categories shaped academic disciplines as well as state and social perceptions. The workshop examines how these knowledge systems emerged, how they became institutionally entrenched, and which continuities and ruptures characterize their histories and their impact. The aim is to reveal the ideological and epistemic influences of “Ostforschung” and to discuss the problems, distortions, and blind spots it has inscribed into contemporary research on Eastern Europe.

The workshop is interdisciplinary in nature and explicitly invites researchers from various fields of the humanities, political science, or economics.

Possible questions include:

- How can historical and interdisciplinary forms of “Ostforschung” be assessed in terms of their political, scholarly, and societal impact?

- Which continuities and breaks characterize the transition from classical “Ostforschung” to contemporary forms of research on Eastern European ?

- What role did individual personalities, academic institutions, and state actors play in constructing and legitimizing “knowledge about the East”?

- How do postcolonial, global, and transnational perspectives influence the critical reassessment of “Ostforschung”?

- What epistemic, ethical, and methodological challenges arise from the continuing legacy of “Ostforschung”?

The workshop will be held in German and English. Please send an abstract (approx. 300 words) and a short CV by March 1, 2026 to: sekretariat@ikgn.de

Kontakt

a.pufelska@ikgn.de

17th Forum Literature and the History of Science

17th Forum Literature and the History of Science

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of the Freie Universität Berlin invite early career scholars to take part in the 17th Forum on Literature and the History of Science, also known as Studientag Literatur und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, which will be held on 19 June 2026, 10 am – 7 pm, at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

The Forum on Literature and the History of Science offers early career scholars an opportunity to discuss their work-in-progress themed on the history of literature and science, as well as other closely relevant topics. To maximize the impact of our discussion for participants, we especially encourage presentations of unfinished projects in various stages of development. Feedback is provided by experts in the respective field.

In this view, all accepted speakers will be requested to pre-circulate papers of 10–20 pages among all registered participants. The papers can be written in English or German. The discussion of all papers will start with comments by experts appointed by the organizers and followed by responses of the authors, each paper receiving about an hour of discussion time.

All interested early career scholars are warmly invited to apply for participation in the Forum by 16 February 2026 with a title, an abstract of up to 500 words of the proposed paper, and an indication of academic affiliation. Accepted speakers will be requested to pre-circulate their papers in PDF format by 21 May 2026. Please register to participate in this event also by 21 May 2026.

Dr. Donatella Germanese, Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte Berlin

Prof. Dr. Jutta Müller-Tamm, Freie Universität Berlin

Prof. Dr. Christina Brandt, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena

Prof. Dr. Bernhard Kleeberg, Universität Erfurt

Dr. Johanna Bohley, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena

Prof. Dr. Jenny Willner, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Dr. Hansjakob Ziemer, Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte Berlin

For registration and questions please contact:

dgermanese@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de

Call for Papers: Environment and Society in East-Central Europe Conference (ESIEE), University of Ostrava, Czechia, 28-29 May 2026

Call for Papers: Environment and Society in East-Central Europe Conference (ESIEE), University of Ostrava, Czechia, 28-29 May 2026

 

The Environment and Society in East-Central Europe Conference 2026 invites scholars from history, environmental studies, sociology, geography, and related disciplines to explore how humans have shaped—and been shaped by—the environment in the East-Central European region. Does East-Central Europe have a distinguished environmental past? If so, how? 

To answer these pressing questions, this conference provides a forum for interdisciplinary exchange, encourages collaboration, and fosters new approaches to understanding the historical and contemporary environmental challenges of the region. 

The 2026 ESIEE Conference welcomes papers and panels addressing a wide range of topics, including but not limited to:

 

Environmental change and resource use

Urban and rural transformations

Environmental activism and civil society

Borders, cross-border regions, and environmental cooperation

Rivers, floods, droughts, and water regimes in long-term perspective

Forests, woodlands, and commons management

Industrialization and the environment beyond pollution

War, militarization, and ecological transformations

Socialist environmentalism: concepts, actors, and strategies

Technology and nature: envirotechnical systems in history

Historical geography and environmental history interactions

Environmental knowledge and the Enlightenment revolution in forestry

“The State Against Nature”: governance and transformation in the 18th–19th centuries

Narratives of “slow hope” in times of crisis

Tracing the roots of East-Central European environmental history

Environmental well-being in East-Central Europe

 

Keynote speakers: Stephen Brain, Mississippi State University, USA, and Doubravka Olšáková Charles University, Czechia

Submission Information:

Individual Papers: Submit your 300-word abstract and page-long bio by 31.1.2026 to cesh(at)osu(dot)cz

Complete Sessions, Workshops, and Interventions: Submit your 300-500 word session abstract with information on approach, goal, contributors’ role, and page-long bio by 31.1.2026 to cesh(at)osu(dot)cz

ESIEE 2026 is supported by the European Society for Environmental History, Slovak Historical Society, University of Ostrava, and the Department of History at the University of Ostrava

Robert Shields Mevissen: The Danube Empire An Environmental History of Habsburg State Building and Civic Engagement.

  Robert Shields Mevissen: The Danube Empire An Environmental History of Habsburg State Building and Civic Engagement.  Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025.  ISBN 9780822967798.

In the nineteenth century, changes to the environment, driven by ideology, natural forces, and burgeoning fossil fuel power, shifted the course of the Habsburg Empire. Along the Danube—Europe’s second longest river—hydraulic engineering projects ranging from bridges to embankments and shipping hubs affected the river’s dynamics, as did new activities related to trade, industrialization, sanitation, recreation, and agriculture. Taking a unique environmental perspective to explore questions of transnational solidarity and identity, The Danube Empire argues that the Danube River served as both a catalyst and a tool for institution building. Drawing on primary sources in German and Hungarian, Robert Shields Mevissen reconstructs how various communities throughout the empire viewed and shaped river engineering works as a means to promote material wellbeing and economic vitality. As they negotiated their conflicting and overlapping interests, they engaged government at all levels, from the imperial to the local, through democratic and civic avenues. Offering new insights into the state’s normative development and robust civil society, Mevissen shows how an empire, in reshaping a river, reshaped itself.

More Praise

 This book is more than just an account of a great river running through an empire in decline. Mevissen makes clear that all human affairs—may they be political, economic, or cultural—must not be separated from the environments they affect and in which they are embedded. Martin Schmid, BOKU University

 The Danube River ran through the Habsburg Monarchy for 850 miles—offering a vast, life-giving artery from one end of the empire to the other. But the promise of irrigation, fishery, navigation, and transportation could only be met if people from Linz to Vienna to Budapest to Bucharest could agree on its use and regulation. This book, written by a fresh new voice in environmental history, traces the work done to make sure the Danube was a source of common good rather than endless conflict. It’s a model of investigating the complex network of economic, social, cultural, and environmental forces at work in managing one of the most critical ecosystems in Central Europe. Alison Frank Johnson, Harvard University

about the author

Robert Shields Mevissen is assistant professor in the Department of Civic Engagement and Leadership at Culver–Stockton College.

Hybrid event: The Letter and the Landscape: Early-Soviet Plant Hunting in Buryat-Mongolia

 Presenter: Maria Pirogovskaya (LMU Munich)

Discussant: Nikolai Erofeev (Free University Berlin)

Organizer and moderator: Anna Mazanik (Max Weber Network Eastern Europe)

December 16, 16:00 CET

Abstract: In this talk, Maria Pirogovskaya will discuss how Buryat Tibetan medicine of Transbaikal Buddhist monasteries became a lucrative source of ethnobotanical and ethnopharmacological knowledge in Soviet natural sciences and medicine during the interbellum period. Mining this knowledge as an archive and a mapping tool to unlock the 'productive forces' of Eastern Siberia, Soviet scientists sought to fight ‘pharmaceutical hunger’ and to discover new items for state exports. The presentation draws on the documentation of scientific expeditions to Transbaikal monasteries and natural habitats to reveal how attempts to adapt Tibetan knowledge for Soviet needs contributed to epistemological translations between heterodox and orthodox medicine, while also highlighting specific environments and the people associated with them. 

Maria Pirogovskaya is a researcher at LMU Munich and a PI in the DFG-funded research project "Socialist Panaceas" that focuses on socialist health and medical heterodoxies in the long Soviet era. Before that, she worked as associate professor at the European University at St. Petersburg in 2016-2021 and a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in 2021-2023. She has received her PhD from the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in 2016.

Nikolai Erofeev is a researcher at Free University Berlin. His current research focuses on the transnational history of mining industries in Inner Asia and their social-environmental impacts. He has received his PhD in history from the University of Oxford in 2020.

Please register to get the Zoom-link: https://forms.gle/1xQBsa4oUFMgtWSw7. The link will be sent on the day of the event. If you have not received the link one our before the event, please contact Anna Mazanik directly at anna.mazanik@mws-osteuropa.org

Tobias Rupprecht (ed.) Market Economists Beyond the West.

Tobias Rupprecht (ed.) Market Economists Beyond the West. The Agents of Peripheral Liberalism, 1970–2020. Routledge 2025.  

Description

This book offers a survey of ideas and practices of economic liberalism beyond Western Europe and North America. It traces the intellectual development and political agency of pro-market economists in Eastern Europe, East Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and West Africa, from the 1970s onwards.

Drawing on original primary-source research from five continents, the contributors to this volume – both internationally recognised senior scholars and emerging historians and social scientists – bring deep regional and linguistic expertise to their analyses. Each chapter critically examines the transformation of planned and state-centric economies into deregulated market systems, exploring these transitions from the perspective of the economists who drove the reforms. By challenging Western-centric narratives of neoliberal policy advice, this book offers fresh insights into the chronology, circulation of ideas, and power dynamics that shaped one of the late twentieth century’s major transformations.

Offering a new approach to the study of liberal ideas outside the West, the book will be of interest to not only academics cutting across disciplinary boundaries, including historians of (the marketisation of) state socialism, but also area specialists on Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Global South.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

Beyond Diffusionism. On the Agents of (Neo-)Liberalism in the (Semi-)Peripheries of the World Economy

Tobias Rupprecht

PART I The Circulation of Market Thought in Soviet-Style Economies

1 The Resilience of Liberal Economic Ideas and Their Contributions to Vietnam’s Market Reform in the 1980s

Tuong Vu and Pham Thi Hong Ha

2 From Marxist to Market Democrat. Su Shaozhi and the Eastern European Roots of Chinese Peripheral Liberalism

Tobias Rupprecht and Alice Trinkle

3 Workers into Partners. Market Socialist Experiments in Soviet Estonia and Their Links to Hungarian and Chinese Reforms, 1975–1988

Juhan Saharov

PART II From Market Socialism to Market Liberalism in Eastern Europe

4 Towards a ‘Real Functioning Market’. Czechoslovakia Between Socialism and Capitalism

Luboš Studený

5 Negotiating the Future of State Socialism. Liberals and Their Contenders in Hungary, 1980–1987

Benedek Pál

6 Between Self-Management and Authoritarianism. Polish Paths to Neoliberalism

Florian Peters

7 Critiques of Neoliberalism Versus Analyses of Postcommunism. The Transformation of Eastern Europe in the 1990s

Venelin Ganev

PART III The Revival of Market Liberalism in the Global South

8 Intellectual Origins of Market Reform Before Nigeria’s Neoliberal Turn

Sa’eed Husaini

9 ‘Neoliberalismo Criollo’. The Many Faces of the Chilean Model

Maximiliano Jara Barrera and George Payne

10 Latin American Business Elites. Intellectual Masterminds of Peripheral Neoliberalism

José Antonio Galindo Dominguez

11 Between Shock and Utopia. Peru’s Neoliberals Beyond the Washington Consensus

Stephan Gruber

12 ‘Every Nation and Its Modernity’. Economics and Society in Arab Liberal Thought

Meir Hatina

Editor(s)

Biography

Tobias Rupprecht is a historian at Freie Universität Berlin and Universität zu Köln, focusing on the global history of socialism, post-socialism, and liberalism. His scholarship often connects Eastern Europe, East Asia, and Latin America. Key publications include 1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe, 2019 (co-authored with James Mark, Bogdan Iacob, and Ljubica Spaskovska), and Soviet Internationalism after Stalin. Interaction and Exchange between the Soviet Union and Latin America during the Cold War, 2015.

J. Krzeski, O. Łojewska, K. Szadkowski, Narodziny dyskursu doskonałości naukowej z ducha terapii szokowej [The birth of the discourse of the scholarly excellence from the ideas of shock therapy],

 J. Krzeski, O. Łojewska, K. Szadkowski, Narodziny dyskursu doskonałości naukowej z ducha terapii szokowej [The birth of the discourse of the scholarly excellence from the ideas of shock therapy], Poznań: Pracownia Komunikacji Naukowej UAM 2025

OA: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.30692363

Niniejszy raport stanowi podsumowanie wyników pracy w ramach PR1 i daje odpowiedź na pytanie: jakie dyskursy o nauce i szkolnictwie wyższym towarzyszyły wprowadzeniu w Polsce terapii szokowej i w jaki sposób ukształtowały one pozostające z nami do dziś ramy myślenia o nauce? W tym celu zrekonstruowano genealogię dyskursu doskonałości naukowej, ukazując, że pojęcie to, dalekie od neutralności, od początku transformacji pełniło funkcję legitymizacji polityki niedoboru i konkurencji oraz służyło jako mechanizm organizujący transformację sektora w warunkach systemowego niedofinansowania. Kluczowym aktorem tego procesu był Komitet Badań Naukowych (KBN) – instytucja powołana w 1991 roku, w kolejnych latach będąca laboratorium wiązania mechanizmów finansowania nauki z wynikami jej ewaluacji. To właśnie w jego ramach i wskutek podejmowanych przez Komitet decyzji ukształtowane zostały podstawowe mechanizmy alokacji środków, konkurencji o finansowanie oraz język doskonałości naukowej sprowadzanej do tego, co w nauce mierzalne.

Analiza obejmuje trzy etapy ewolucji tej logiki na gruncie działalności KBN:

1. Instalację „darwinowskiej” konkurencji w warunkach skrajnego niedofinansowania (1991–1994), kiedy doskonałość naukowa zaczęła funkcjonować jako uzasadnienie selektywnego przydziału ograniczonych środków.

2. Przekształcenie dyskursu doskonałości w główny sposób ustalania priorytetów badawczych w państwie pozbawionym narzędzi do prowadzenia faktycznej polityki naukowej (1995–1997).

3. Scalenie doskonałości z logiką bibliometryczną (1997–1999), które przekształciło ją w technokratyczny reżim zarządzania niedofinansowaną nauką w kategoriach mierzalnej efektywności i globalnej widzialności.