Identities beyond the nation - Workshop
by Dominique Reill (University of Miami)
3 June 2019 | 10.00 – 12.00 | Bushuis E 1.01E
Recent scholarship on processes of identification and belonging in Europe’s past and present undergoes an ongoing paradigm shift that gives rise to a more multidimensional understanding of relations between nationalism, sovereignty, self-determination and democracy (Nimni 2009). This tendency has increasingly highlighted the importance of questions of regionalism, peripheries, (urban) cosmopolitanisms and trans- and cross-border processes of identification, and how these found resonance in a variety of cultural and political ideas, practices and institutions throughout modern history. Much work has been done in the fields of area studies, nationalism and borderland studies, yet leaving scholars with a divergent mosaic of understandings and notions of what these multileveled concepts of identification actually implicate for their research. In our intention to discuss these tendencies against the background of on-going research projects in cross-regional perspectives, we have invited one of the currents most notable contributors to these debates on identities beyond the nation, Dominique K. Reill.
This workshop, jointly facilitated by the Amsterdam School for Regional, Transnational and European Studies (ARTES) and the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies (ACES), aims to tackle this problem by offering interested PhD candidates and RMa students of all disciplines the possibility of addressing these questions of multileveled identification in an informal intellectual exchange. Central to the workshop is the question of how multileveled concepts of identification beyond the nation could be applied as categories of analysis in historical research.
Dominique Reill, Associate Professor at the University of Miami in Florida, specializes in Modern European history with particular emphases on dynamics of regionalism and nationalism, the Nineteenth Century, Italy, and the Balkans, as well as cultural and intellectual history. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2007. Reill has published extensively on the
history of multidimensional understandings of identifications in Europe, most importantly Nationalists Who Feared the Nation: Adriatic Multi-Nationalism in Habsburg Dalmatia, Trieste, and Venice (Stanford UP, 2012). Currently, Reill is finishing a new book that looks at the fascinating case of a centuries-old city-state’s resistance to President Woodrow Wilson’s plans for a Versailles-determined order of European nation-states. Her newest project focuses on The Habsburg mayor of New York – Fiorello LaGuardia.
Registration
Deadline for submission is 1 May 2019.
Please send your application, mentioning your name, university and research school, including short motivation to m.p.vanhout@uva.nl.
The workshop is open to PhD candidates, research MA students, and junior scholars in European Studies, History, CEDLA, geography and related fields (up to 10 participants).
Venue: Bushuis – E 1.01E
Time: 10.00-12.00h.
Preparation
Participants are asked to:
- read four key articles;
- formulate a critical question concerning each of the required readings;
- prepare a short essay (ca. 500 words) on the relationship between their own research and the discussion topic;
- send the essay at least two weeks before the workshop to p.vanhout@uva.nl (deadline: 20 May 2019);
- read the other participants’ essays.
Required readings
- Arjun Appadurai (1996) “Sovereignty without Territoriality. Notes for a Postnational Geography.” In The Geography of Identity, ed. Patricia Yaeger, pp. 40-58. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan
- Celia Applegate, ‘Europe of Regions: Reflections on the Historiography of Sub-National Places in Modern Times’, The American Historical Review; 104, No. 4 (Oct., 1999), pp. 1157-1182.
- Ronald Grigor Suny (2001) “Constructing Primordialism: Old Histories for New Nations.”
The Journal of Modern History 73(4): 862-896.
- Tara Zahra, “Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis”
Slavic Review 69, No. 1 (Spring, 2010): 93-119.
Programme
The workshop is organized as an interactive meeting, including an introduction by Dominique Reill, followed by several sessions, in which the articles and the participants papers will be presented (ca. 5 minutes per presentation) and discussed.
After the workshop, Dominique Reill will give a lecture – The Habsburg mayor of New York– to which all participants, and others, are cordially invited.
The lecture will take place at 17.00h at the Bushuis – F 2.11B.
