NextGenPhDs Labs are a series of seminars, panel discussions, and workshops that offer our students opportunity to study international affairs in historical context to understand our complex world. These seminars are designed to assist our students with integrating science advice with various forms of public engagement and becoming knowledgeable scholars, leaders, and teachers in a global community that transcends borders. They are also meant to facilitate networks with the global community of scholars and equips them with new contacts and possibilities.
April 8-9, 2024
Prof. Katja Castryck-Naumann (GWZO, Lepzig University, DE)
Title: “Academic Writing”
Bio: Katja Castryck-Naumann is a Research Fellow at the Leipzig Centre for the History and Culture of East Central Europe (GWZO) and lecturer at the Global and European Studies Institute at the Leipzig University. She studied history in Leipzig, Edinburgh and Vienna and received her PhD in 2012 for a dissertation about the formation of world history teaching and research in the US and for which she was awarded the Walter-Markov-Prize. Currently she works on the representation of East Central European states in international organisations and contributes to a handbook on the transnational history of the region. Further she participates in a research group at Arhus University on the development of neoliberalism in comparative and transnational perspective.
May 7, 2024
Prof. Holly Case (Brown University, USA)
Title: „Historical Reflections on Historical Method”
Description: The poet and writer Paul Valéry once referred to history as „the most dangerous compound yet contrived by the chemistry of the intellect.” His claim inspired the historian Marc Bloch to write The Craft of History, long a standard text on the nature and possibilities of historical method. The seminar considers what drove the search for a better historical method in the interwar period and what has become of that drive in our time.
Bio: Holly Case is Professor of History at Brown University. Her first book, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during WWII (2009), shows how the struggle for mastery among Europe’s Great Powers was affected by the perspectives of small states. She also wrote The Age of Questions: Or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond (2018), about when and why people started thinking in terms of “questions” and how it altered their sense of political possibility. Case has written on European history, literature, politics and ideas for various magazines and newspapers, including The Guardian, The Chronicle Review, Aeon, The Nation, Dissent, The Times Literary Supplement, Eurozine, and Boston Review.
May 9, 2024
Prof. Doina Anca Cretu (Warwick University, UK)
Title: “Humanitarian Containment: Austria-Hungary and the Origins of Modern Refugee Camps in the Era of the First World War”
Description: The First World War generated the mass displacement of up to 2 million people across the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. State authorities responded to this displacement crisis through the making of a network of refugee camps. As the war went on, refugee encampment shifted from a temporary method of containment to a long-term scheme of state-driven humanitarian intervention and welfare policies. This talk explores the emergence and transformation of modern refugee encampment as a tool of displacement governance as seen in Austria-Hungary during the First World War. This research is part of the European Research Council Consolidator Grant project “Unlikely Refuge? Refugees and Citizens in East-Central Europe during the Twentieth Century,” Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences.
Bio: Doina Anca Cretu is a historian of foreign aid and migration. Her work is at the intersection between international history and modern history of central and eastern Europe. She is currently a Research Fellow within the ERC Consolidator Grant “Unlikely Refuge? Refugees and Citizens in East-Central Europe during the Twentieth Century” (Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague) and a Visiting Lecturer at University of Vienna. (Anca holds a PhD from Graduate Institute Geneva; she was a Max Weber Fellow at European University Institute in Florence, as well as a Visiting Fellow at University of Oxford, Graduate Center at City University of New York, and at Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.) From September 2024 she will start a new position as Assistant Professor of Modern European History at University of Warwick (UK). Her first book Foreign Aid and State Building in Interwar Romania: In Quest of an Ideal will be out later this year with Stanford University Press.
June 3, 2024
Prof. Silvia Zago (Liverpool University, UK)
Title: “Tales of the Otherworld from Egypt to the Classical World”
Abstract: The belief in the existence of life after death is one of the most defining and fascinating aspects of the ancient Egyptian culture. Despite being the end of human life on earth, death was also thought to be the beginning of a transition to a new state of being and into a supernatural, invisible dimension called Duat. Despite being commonly translated as ‘underworld’ or ‘netherworld’ – words inherently pointing to its characterisation as a subterranean locale – this term refers broadly to the realm of the dead, which is multifaceted by nature. Ever since its earliest attestations in the funerary literature of the late 3rd millennium BC, the notion of Duat always possessed celestial and chthonic features at once, which were intertwined with further cosmological notions at all times. Exploring funerary texts from ancient Egypt, this lecture will look at how the otherworld was conceptualised and will explore the multi-millennial developments at the core of the many scenarios for post-mortem existence available to the ancient Egyptians. Furthermore, it will establish a connection with the notions surrounding life after death in the Classical world. Though seemingly quite distant from one another, we will see that ancient Mediterranean cultures, from ancient Egypt to the multicultural setting of the Greek and Roman worlds, shared more facets than we would think, including a versatile approach to afterlife beliefs.
Bio: Silvia Zago is a Lecturer in Egyptology in the Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology of the University of Liverpool, where she also holds the role of Coordinator of the Liverpool Schools Classics Project. She obtained a PhD in Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations (Egyptology) from the University of Toronto, where she taught courses on ancient Egyptian history, culture, and language for several years. She moreover holds an MA in Languages and Cultures of the Near and Middle East (Egyptology) from the University of Pisa (Italy) and a BA in Heritage Studies (Near Eastern Archaeology) from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy).
June 4, 2024
Prof. Sarah Lemmen (Universidad Complutense, Madrid, ES)
Title: 'A Spanish Radio Free Europe? Transnational reflections on the use of radio as a weapon of communication in Cold War Europe and the role of Eastern European émigrés in giving the radio a voice’
Abstract: On January 11, 1949, the Spanish national broadcasting service Radio Nacional de España (RNE) began airing on short wave its first program in the Polish language with what would become its signature phrase, “Tu Radio Nacional de España”, in a combination of Polish and Spanish. By the end of the year, the same phrase could be heard in five other Eastern European languages, namely in Hungarian, Romanian, Slovak, Ukrainian, as well as in Russian. These programs were part of the “radio wars” for the hearts and minds of the ever-growing number of listeners across the Iron Curtain in the ensuing Cold War alongside more well-known foreign language broadcasts such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) or the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).
In this seminar we will discuss, among others, the role of Francoist Spain in postwar Europe, why RNE is relevant to understanding the Cold War, and how the field of transnational history changes the understanding of European history.
Bio: PhD in Contemporary History from the University of Vienna (Austria). She is currently Assistant Professor at the Complutense University of Madrid. Her research focuses on the history of Central and Eastern Europe in the contemporary era and its relations with Western Europe and the global world. After several researches on travel and tourism history culminating in a doctoral thesis on Czech travel and travelers in Africa, Asia and Latin America between 1890 and 1938 (awarded the Grete-Mostny-Preis of the University of Vienna), she has expanded her line of work in the field of global and transnational history with studies on exile and migration and the cultural history of the Cold War. His publications include a monograph „Traveling Czechs. Representations of the Non-European World and National Identity in Central Europe (1890-1938)” (Wien: Böhlau, 2018; in German), the co-edited volume „Orientalisms in Central and Eastern Europe” (Bielefeld: transcript, 2014; in German), and dossiers in the journals European Review of History (23/4 2016) and International Journal of Maritime History (33/1 2021).
October 22, 2024
Thomas Hylland Eriksen (University of Oslo, NO)
Title: TBA
Bio: Thomas Hylland Eriksen is an anthropologist and writer based at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo.
