The conference aims at summarising the conclusions of the ERC NEPOSTRANS project with a view towards its potential historiographic consequences. The project is a comparative study of local histories of transition at the end of the Great War, focusing on the successor states of the Habsburg Monarchy. Its key themes are state, elites and their challengers, ethnicity, and local discourses. At this conference, together with presenting the most important conclusions, we intend to test possible historiographic “revisions” of modern East and Central European history based on our findings.

• Key theoretical elements of the project are comparisons of intercrossings (Zimmerman and Werner) and the generalisations drawn from case studies by building typologies of transitions. While the first one attempts to give “depth” to the analysis and to extend it chronologically backwards and forward from the end of the First World War, the second serves to horizontally extend its conclusions. Thus, it is not only the specific findings of the case studies that need testing, but how they can be generalised. Instead of simply exposing the conclusions to criticism, we want to ask how much and in what form local studies of transition could help to rethink the existing narratives (regional, national, global, etc.) of the period and the history of East and Central Europe in general.

The conference is structured around two-paper panels that address the key themes and offer local case studies (Northern Tyrol, North-Eastern Istria, Prekmurje, Kolomiya, Southern Moravia and Northern Lower Austria, Northeastern Bohemia, Baia Mare, Southern Banat and the surroundings of Budapest), with responses by invited commentators. The papers/presentations aim to make clear how the findings challenge existing historical conceptualisations, and how the local cases are situated within their national contexts (i.e., what they tell us about transition and the respective country in general). We strive to not simply differentiate the local perspective’s difference from the more general one, but to also reflect on what kind of commonalities we have discovered that were so far obscured. Commentators will reflect on the broader regional significance of the conclusions, but they are also invited to consider how the project’s approach is related to other alternative conceptualisations of history that circumvent or challenge the conventional, mostly national histories of the region.

Attachments:

Conference 9-10 November programme.pdf

HEC Events – Privacy Statement – Sept 2021.pdf