Transregional Dynamics in Eastern Europe and the Americas: New Empirical Approaches
Katja Castryck-Naumann (GWZO), Corinne Geering (GWZO) & Paul Vickers (CITAS, Universität Regensburg)
Abstract
For several years now, there has been lively discussion on how East European studies and other area studies can make fruitful use of the theoretical and methodological debates in global studies for comparative research and research exploring entanglements. A whole host of conceptual options have emerged, from “Comparative Area Studies” to “Transregional Studies”. East European studies have proven particularly adept at integrating transregional contexts into new approaches in area studies. What also becomes evident in existing discussions is that programmatic ideas on methods and approaches have been connected with empirical research only to a limited extent. Thus, what still remains underexplored is how actors adapted and circulated practices and discourses in different spaces, the extent to which actors were aware of these entanglements and their impact on their own actions, how different ideas supplemented, complemented or competed with each other, and which restrictions shaped historical and present-day experience.
This workshop seeks to address these questions by inviting researchers to present current book and habilitation projects that combine area studies research with approaches inspired by global and/or comparative area studies. There is general consensus, on the conceptual level, that area studies should take into account both intra-regional relations as well as transregional entanglements, with this turn ensuring that regions and subregions (such as East-Central or Southeast Europe) have also acquired more refined contours through their inclusion in global processes. In this workshop, we would like to examine and discuss collaboratively how ongoing projects have implemented new conceptions of area studies and space, which difficulties arise in the course of such efforts, but above all which new questions and research foci can emerge from this. How suited are the established and emerging conceptual and analytical frameworks within area studies to empirical research on the regions under investigation? How can the boundaries between sites of theoryproduction and locations of empirical knowledge and source material be more fluid? The workshop will be concluded and rounded off with an evening event that explores transregional dynamics in curatorial practice.
Biographical Notes
Dr. Katja Castryck-Naumann studied history, political science, and philosophy at the Universities of Leipzig, Edinburgh, and Vienna. She received her PhD from Leipzig University and has held visiting positions at institutions including the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Aarhus University. She has been a researcher at the GWZO since 2008 and is currently the coordinator of the GWZO’s support for early-career researchers. Her research focuses on the history of international organizations and transnational actors, transregional connections in Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the history and theory of Area Studies. She teaches at the University of Leipzig and other institutions, and she has been recognized with awards including the 2013 Walter-Markov-Prize for History and the International Commission for the History and Theory of Historiography’s PhD Prize.
Dr. Corinne Geering is a Junior Research Group Leader at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), Leipzig, Germany. She completed her PhD in Eastern European History at the Justus-Liebig-University Giessen in 2018. Her dissertation, “Building a Common Past: World Heritage in Russia under Transformation, 1965-2000”, focused on the history of cultural heritage in Russia. Her research interests are broad, encompassing the transregional history of Eastern Europe, the history of rural spaces, material culture and cultural heritage, as well as cultural diplomacy and politics.
Dr. Paul Vickers, born in Leicester, England in 1984, is a significant figure in Slavonic and East European Studies. He completed his PhD at the University of Glasgow, where his work focused on relations between popular autobiography, memory, and censorship in the context of postwar Poland. He has held various academic positions, including a lecturer role at the Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University in Ukraine and a postdoctoral researcher role at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture at Justus Liebig University, Giessen. Since April 2018, he has managed the Center for International and Transnational Area Studies (CITAS) at the University of Regensburg and the Leibniz ScienceCampus “Europe and America in the Modern World”.