The Black Sea as Historical Meso-Region: Concepts in Cultural Studies and the Social Sciences

Abstract

The discussion on a Black Sea meso-region, now in full swing, should be of interest to historians for multiple reasons: First, it directly affects how we construct meso-regional spaces, such as ‘Southeastern Europe’, ‘East-Central Europe’, or ‘Eurasia.’ Second, it offers possibilities for comparison with other maritime-based meso-regional concepts, such as ‘the Mediterranean’, ‘the Levant’, ‘the Adriatic’ or ‘the Baltic Sea’/‘Northeastern Europe’. Third, it provides a gateway to a global historical approach to trans-maritime seascapes and coastal societies, such as ‘Atlantic world’, ‘Red Sea’, or ‘Indian Ocean’. Finally, it sharpens our understanding that the historical meso-regions of Europe extend far beyond the conventional political, geographic, or cultural structures of ‘EUrope’.

Biographical Note

Prof. Dr. Stefan Troebst ( SFB 1199 & Leipzig University)

Stefan Troebst has been Deputy Director at the GWZO since 1999. He studied History, Slavic Studies, Balkan Studies, Political Science and Islamic Studies at the Free University of Berlin as well as at the Universities of Tübingen, Sofia (Bulgaria), Skopje (Yugoslavia, today Macedonia) and Indiana University in Bloomington, (U.S.A.) and wrote his doctoral thesis on “Mussolini, Macedonia and the Powers 1922-1930: The ‘Inner Macedonian Revolutionary Organization’ in the Southeast European Policy of Fascist Italy”. He was a research associate and university assistant for Eastern European Contemporary History at the Institute for Eastern European Studies at the Free University of Berlin and a postdoctoral fellow of the German Research Foundation. He habilitated on the topic “Trade Control – ‘Derivation’ – Containment. Swedish Moscow Policy 1617-1661” (published in Wiesbaden 1997); after holding a professorship in Modern History at the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Hamburg and a Heisenberg fellowship from the DFG, he was appointed Professor of Cultural Studies of Eastern Central Europe at the Philological Faculty of the University of Leipzig in 1999. Since 2015, he has been Professor of Cultural History for Eastern Europe at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Philosophy there, as well as Head of the Master’s programme “European Studies” at the Global and European Studies Institute (GESI) at the University of Leipzig.https://home.uni-leipzig.de/jmcoe/people/prof-dr-stefan-troebst/