Call for Applications
New Approaches to the History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath in Yugoslavia, Greece, and Albania (1939-1949)
Venues: Humboldt University Berlin (October 2015), École française d’Athènes (March 2016)
Conveners: Dr. Xavier Bougarel (Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin), Prof. Hannes Grandits (Humboldt University, Berlin), and Prof. Nathalie Clayer (CETOBAC/EHESS, Paris)
Doctoral researchers, both in the early and final stages of pursuing their PhD, are invited to apply for participation in events organized in the framework of the international project on “New Approaches to the History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath in Yugoslavia, Greece, and Albania (1939-1949)”, to take place in Berlin in October 2015 and in Athens in March 2016. The language of the preparatory workshop in Berlin and the final conference in Athens will be English.
The international project on the Second World War and its aftermath in Yugoslavia, Greece and Albania is jointly coordinated by the Humboldt University in Berlin and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. The project focuses on the three occupied countries of Southeastern Europe, and includes the postwar years, characterized by a continuation of massive violence in all three countries.
The project aims at accomplishing the following tasks:
- to assess the "state of the art" of research Albania, Greece, Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Kosovo and Montenegro
- to identify PhD researchers working on the Second World War in Yugoslavia, Greece and Albania
- to sketch pertinent research questions in order to design the framework of the final conference
- to discuss how future research can foster integration, comparison, and entanglement of the history of the Second World War in Southeastern Europe into European and global research on that war
Xavier Bougarel (Berlin), Hannes Grandits (Berlin), and Nathalie Clayer (Paris) coordinate the project. Its other members are Paolo Fonzi (Berlin/Naples), Tchavdar Marinov (Paris/Athens), Nadège Ragaru (Paris), Milan Ristović (Belgrade), Drago Roksandić (Zagreb), Sabine Rutar (Regensburg), Fabien Théofilakis (Montreal/Paris), Nevenka Troha (Ljubljana), Polymeris Voglis (Athens), and Marija Vulesica (Berlin). Holm Sundhaussen, Professor Emeritus of Southeastern European History at the Free University Berlin, acts as senior advisor.
Invited PhD researchers will be invited to participate in two events:
A preparatory workshop will take place in Berlin in October 2015 and will give the PhD candidates an opportunity to present and discuss their research. This will be a special occasion to present and test their findings by discussing it in a circle of established scholars.
A final conference will take place at the École française d’Athènes (March 2016). This will be an international conference conceptualized along the core topical tropes of the project. The PhD researchers will be encouraged to submit a scientific paper; they will be asked to take an active part in the discussion.
Your proposal should clearly point out the research questions you are studying. It should also contain information on how you think that your PhD research will add innovative knowledge on the Second World War, and which, according to you, are the most pressing further research lacunae in the field.
Please place your application within one of the following research tropes:
1) Forms and logics of mass violence, 1941-1949
2) Power structures, resistance, and the local populations during and after the war
3) Social and cultural history of the war and the postwar period
A preliminary, not exhaustive list of research questions may serve as a guiding thread in crafting your proposal:
1) How have the logics of violence between war and postwar been studied? What is the state of the art when it comes to the history of social and demographic engineering (nationalist and racial ideologies, forced migration, genocide etc.)? In what ways has the history of the Holocaust been studied in the Southeast European countries?
2) What is the state of the art when it comes to the history of German and Italian occupation (national socialist / fascist institutions versus local institutions etc.) in Southeastern Europe, in particular with regard to the question of resistance and collaboration? How has the postwar violence and the struggle for a postwar order been researched?
3) What is the state of the art when it comes to an agency-centred social history of the war and its aftermath? In what ways have micro-/ local history and the history of the everyday been pursued? In what ways have master narratives been challenged/deconstructed? In what ways has the New Military History been useful for renovating the historiography on the Second World War in Southeastern Europe?
Please send us your proposal (max. 2 pages) and a short CV by Monday, 1 December 2014, at the latest.
Contact: Xavier Bougarel (xbougarel@yahoo.fr), Sabine Rutar (rutar@ios-regensburg.de)