Abstracts Archive

Re-enactments have become an increasingly popular mode of predominantly war-related history. In contrast to conventional modes of historical inquiry, re-enactment offers a 'body-based discourse' through which the past is reanimated through physical and psychological experiences. So far, most studies...

Last January, after the screening at the State Duma of the film Soyuz Spaseniya (Andrey Kravchuk, 2019), about the Decembrist revolt in 1825, Vladimir Zhirinovski, Chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, told the press the following:"A wonderful film; it shows an important moment of our...

This paper looks into writer Aminatta Forna's critical engagement with transitional justice processes in her novel The Hired Man (2013).  Born in Scotland and raised in Sierra Leone and Great Britain, Forna has shown a sustained concern with civil conflict and post-conflict reconstruction i...

In 1992, the Hamburg-based Spar Handels AG supermarket chain announced the launch of a 1.3 million DM advertising and sales campaign dedicated to the products of the rapidly disappearing GDR. The "From the New German Lands" campaign (re)introduced grocery products from the communist period to store ...

In my paper, I would like to tackle the problem of representation of Eastern Europe as a post-genocidal void in (mostly) Western Holocaust studies. For long, Western scholarship was not interested in this landscape and fates of those who were in fact the majority of the six million: the Ostjuden. I...

This paper traces the ethnic Serb population of Croatia in three stages: first, with the earliest migrations to the Croatian territories in the 17th  and 18th centuries; during the Second World War and the killing of tens of thousands of ethnic Serbs by the fascistic Independent State of Croatia (N...

Warsaw was the only capital behind the Iron Curtain that did not commit to the construction of a Joseph's Stalin monument after the Second World War. Nevertheless, this does not mean that no attempt was made to erect a sculpture of Generalissimus. The paper describes the history of memory and the tr...

 The decolonization of India after 200 years of the British Raj was coterminous with the Partition of the country along religious-ethnic lines in 1947. Genocidal violence between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs during the Partition led to two million deaths and displaced over twelve-sixteen million peopl...

Although African American Romare Bearden is now considered one of the greatest American artists of the twentieth century, his early work has never received the attention it deserves. This may be because its aggressive political messages contrast too much with his later, less activist, and more mai...

Simulating the perspective of children has always been an important memory tool in immersive and empathetic representations of past atrocities and violence in literature, film, fictional autobiography, and museums to achieve an emotional proximity between past and present. This paper will analyze ho...

This paper analyzes how the 1948 Yiddish-Polish film Unzere Kinder directed by Natan Gross and Shaul Goskind anticipates much later debates of the 1980s and 1990s on how the Holocaust ought to be represented and how these representations might enable a healing from the trauma of the Holocaust for bo...

Violence begets violence. This paper explores disruptive colonial legacies in Northeast Asia. Genocidal ripples in the region refracted murder through multiple homicidal regimes, savage conflicts, and devastating humanitarian crises during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Atrocity return...

In Pripyat, there is a duplicity, a double city: there is the ghost town of ruin porn and internet fame, and there is the space you find in situ, teeming with nature and filled with objects left behind after the city's undoing. There are the YouTube videos of stalkers swaggering and drinking radioac...

17th century Pernambuco, a north-eastern captaincy of the Portuguese colony of Brazil, was marked by the presence of an insurgent counter-society, founded in the hinterland by rebel slaves. For about a century this community, today known as the Quilombo of Palmares, persisted as a space of autonomy ...

In Germany, some 100,000 memorials to the First World War had been erected, from simple boulders bearing a plaque to large and elaborate constructions. From the very beginning, these memorials were accompanied by heated public discussions: who should be remembered, and with which intentions? When th...

This presentation investigates the role cultural products and practices produced, narrated and/or inspired by women and members of the LGBTQ community of the early 21st century play in Colombia in the context of public debates about writing and documenting the historical legacies of violence, and in...

This study aims to investigate how individual memories could help build a collective memory, through the case of historical photographs taken at Foto Gagin, a photo studio which was active during the years 1902-1955 in Izmir, Turkey. This study is largely based on photographs that are part of a hist...

Children born of war (CBOW) are individuals whose one parent, usually the mother, was a member of the invaded (occupied) local community and one, usually the father, was one of the invaders, occupiers, simply enemies. For the purpose of my research carried out in Poland I have adopted a slightly bro...

Recently, all major history museums in Estonia – the Estonian National Museum, the Estonian History Museum as well as the Estonian Museum of Occupations and Freedom Vabamu have opened new permanent exhibitions containing innovative approaches to the 20th century past. While history museums (pa...

During the past 15 years, literatures from Central and Central Eastern Europe has been marked by a boom of testimonies of involvement in 20th century totalitarianisms. Müller's Atemschaukel (2009; "The Hunger Angel"), Denemarková's, Peníze od Hitlera (2006; ...

In 1959, Turkey applied for association with the European Economic Community (EEC), which came into force in 1963. With the aim of full membership in the EEC and in the context of cold war and block formation, it is questionable whether reporting on the Eichmann trial - one of the major media events...