CFP: “Defining Soviet Antisemitism: Everyday Jewish Experiences in the USSR”

Deadline: July 1, 2024

Call for Papers for an Edited Volume

Edited by Paula Chan (All Souls College, University of Oxford) and Irina Rebrova (Center for Research on Antisemitism, Technical University, Berlin)

Antisemitism was a thread that ran through the entire fabric of the Soviet Union. During the interwar period, Bolshevik ideology condemned the persecution of Jews as an evil relic of Imperial Russian rule. Meanwhile, Westerners as prominent as Henry Ford accused the USSR of being a Jewish institution, and Adolf Hitler’s opposition to “Judeo-Bolshevism” drove his vision for a new order in Europe. Upon the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, local antisemitism collided with hostility toward Stalin’s regime, with catastrophic consequences for Jews on Soviet territory. After the end of World War II, the USSR was the first country to recognize the state of Israel. Yet in the years that followed, Soviet leaders embraced discrimination against Jews like never before, even as they insisted that the USSR remained a bastion of anti-antisemitism. Scholars have grappled with the contradictions that surround antisemitism in the Soviet context in different ways. Events such as the prosecution of members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the Doctor’s Plot have loomed especially large, as have sweeping statements on Soviet responses to what we now call the Holocaust. Much of the literature tends to take Soviet antisemitism for granted – when the victim is Jewish, the repression is antisemitic. Intellectual siloing of Jewish, Soviet, and post-Soviet national studies perpetuate existing gaps in knowledge.

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Conference: Moving Beyond The Center-Periphery Dynamics: Central and Eastern Europe From The Mid-19th Century to The Present

April 5-6, 2024 | University of Ottawa, Canada 

May 30-31, 2024 | University of Lille, France

Since the 18th century, the discourse on modernization—understood as a process aiming to align social organization with the expectations and needs of societies and carrying a promise of emancipation—identifies the Western form of modernity, in its political (democracy) and economic (capitalism) dimensions, as a model to follow. In the multicultural empires of Central and Eastern Europe, divergences in the paths and rhythms of political, economic, and social modernization engraved in collective imaginaries the idea of a structural delay of these societies compared to the rest of Europe, relegating them to the periphery—or semi-periphery—of the Western world (Ivan T. Berend). Since the works of Larry Wolf and Maria Todorova, this sort of intra-European orientalism has been deconstructed. Nevertheless, the discourse of structural delay in this part of Europe compared to the core of the western world has been influential in the Austrian, Russian, and Ottoman empires and in the countries that succeeded them, from the end of the First World War to today. This discourse justified structural reforms and enabled the rise of social groups interested in and useful for these reforms. It also fueled dissenting discourses and contributed to the production of alternative models, in a relationship of interdependence and exchange with countries situated in the core of the Western world (Claudia Kraft). This conference aims to examine the experience of Central and Eastern European countries with the modernization process from the late 18th century to the present, beyond the center-periphery dynamics.

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CFP: The Future of Central and Eastern Europe

Deadline: May 1, 2024

28-29 October 2024, University of Ottawa, Canada

“The Future of Central and Eastern Europe” is a joint interdisciplinary conference organized by the Chair in Slovak History and Culture of the University of Ottawa, Canada, and the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. We encourage a dialogue between scholars, both Central European and international, to explore as broadly as possible the current challenges that Central and Eastern Europe is facing today, and its possible future development. We encourage reflection on all its cultural, social, economic, and political dimensions.

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CFP: Hidden Connections: Eastern Europe through a Comparative Lens – WEast 2024 Dublin Workshop

Deadline: May 6, 2024

 The economic history of Eastern Europe is sometimes written as that of an isolated, peripheral region. In this workshop, we want to emphasise the historical connections between Eastern and Western Europe, as well as to other regions of the world. By reassessing the transnational circulation of people, goods, ideas, techniques, diseases, institutions and other factors, this workshop aims to highlight innovative work that uses new archival data, advanced microdata, or techniques of causal analysis to offer a truly integrated East-West perspective. We also celebrate research that integrates insights and research techniques from multiple disciplines to redefine our understanding of Europe’s complex shared economic, industrial, ideological, and political past.

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CFP:  Baltic Connections 2024: a Conference in Social Science History

Deadline: March 15, 2024

 June 12–14, 2024, University of Jyväskylä, Finland

The submission deadline for the Baltic Connections 2024 conference in Jyväskylä, Finland, has been extended to March 15, 2024.

The fifth Riitta Hjerppe Lecture in Social Science History will be given by Naomi Lamoreaux (Yale University). Additional plenary sessions will be delivered by Matthias Kipping (York University in Canada), and Hanna Kuusi (University of Helsinki).

Conference website and submissions:

https://www.helsinki.fi/en/conferences/baltic-connections

Call for Applications: 2024 Research Training Workshop

Deadline: March 1, 2024

At the Summer Research Laboratory on Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

June 14-15, 2024

Moderators:
Professor Anna Whittington (Department of History, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
Dr. Nataliia Laas (Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs)

Soviet Citizenship in Flux: New Perspectives on Late Socialism and After

The Russian war on Ukraine has raised the question of why the relations between the citizens and the state diverge greatly in different post-Soviet states. This research training workshop starts from the supposition that many of these differences stem from differentiated and unequal practices of citizenship in the late Soviet era. We seek to bring together scholars working across a wide geographic and temporal spectrum, illuminating both differences in the discourses and practices of citizenship and their evolution over time and space. Key themes include the relationship between center and “peripheries”; the tensions between citizenship as conceived by political and cultural elites and citizens; the formation of new rituals and practices to promote belonging; the transformation of citizenship practices at times of upheaval and uncertainty; and the varied and contested legacies of Soviet citizenship across the former Soviet Union. We are especially interested in papers that offer political, social, economic, and ecological perspectives on late socialism and early independence.

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CFP: The 6th Workshop on Business History in Central and Eastern Europe (University of Vienna)

Deadline: April 15, 2024

supported by European Business History Association (EBHA)

Business History and Transformations in Central & Eastern Europe

Place: University of Vienna 

Date: October 24-25, 2024

Call for papers 

Abstract template

This year’s workshop is entitled “Business History and Transformations in Central & Eastern Europe”. Its focus will be on the variety of challenges that enterprises and entrepreneurs had to cope with during times of significant political, economic, social, and cultural changes and upheavals in the region of CEE from the 19th century to the early 21st century. We recognize the events of the revolutionary uprisings across CEE in 1848/49, the Austro-Hungarian compromise of 1867, the (re)emergence of new states in CEE after the end of the First World War 1918, the rise of state-socialist dictatorships in CEE after 1945, or the systemic transformations of 1989-91 as profound turning points in the history of CEE. However, we also agree that these events cannot be reduced to isolated “numeric keywords” as they were rather peaks of longer-lasting processes of change(s). We thus refer to concepts of transformation that emphasize transformation as a process of “accelerated” political, economic, and societal change with an often “unspecified” time frame of its beginning and its end (see for example Ther 2014; Kührer-Wielach, Lemmen 2016). Although there is a scholarly consensus that entrepreneurship is an important driver of transformational processes, the question of “how entrepreneurs initiate, contribute to, prevent, or foster transformation in markets and societies” remains largely unexplored (Lubinski et al. 2023, p.5). This question also applies to the role of companies and its various stakeholders in transformation processes. 

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Call for Papers! NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction

Deadline: Ongoing

Novel: A Forum on Fiction is accepting submissions. Founded in 1967 at Brown
University, Novel is a peer-reviewed journal devoted to the best new
criticism and theory in novel studies. After several decades under the editorship of Nancy
Armstrong, Kevin McLaughlin took over as the chief editor in Summer 2023.
Novel holds to these general principles:

  1. as long as there have been novels, there has been a need for critical
    scholarship to explain how novels should and do make and evaluate the
    foundational categories of modern life.
  2. so long as novels continue to be written, literate populations will continue
    to dwell within categories inaugurated by its forms.
    We welcome submissions that address one or more of these concerns and use a
    novel or group of novels to do so. The essays we favor are relatively self-
    conscious about the theoretical and historical framework that informs
    their critical
    argument, so long as that argument uses fiction to challenge the historical
    narrative or theoretical assumptions that are brought to bear on it.
    Submissions should be between 7000-9000 words (inclusive of footnotes but
    excluding works cited), in accordance with MLA style (9th ed.).
    Please send submissions and inquiries to novel_forum@brown.edu.

Interdisciplinary Workshop: “Ukrainian Refugees in Germany and the United States after the War: Implications for Global Refugee Policy” (University of Passau, Germany)

Deadline to attend: April 1, 2024


June 28-29, 2024
American Studies, University of Passau
Organizers: Grit Grigoleit-Richter (University of Passau, Germany) and Claudia Sadowski-Smith (Arizona State University, USA)


Keynotes: Miriam Finkelstein (University of Vienna, Austria), Halyna Lemekh (St. Francis College, USA), and Jannis Panagiotidis (University of Vienna, Austria)

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CFP: Chicago Language Symposium (University of Illinois-Chicago_

Deadline: February 21, 2024

CALL FOR PROPOSALS
for
THE CHICAGO LANGUAGE SYMPOSIUM 2024
Action-Oriented Pedagogies in Language Teaching
April 27, 2024
University of Illinois-Chicago
At the turn of the 21st Century, innovative approaches to language teaching
have placed the “learning by doing” principle into focus based on
the premise that students learn a language by using the language. ACTFL’s
Performance Indicators, influenced by the Can-Do Statements of
the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), have set the
basis for instruction to be action-oriented where the goal
is for students to accomplish relevant and engaging real-world tasks and
projects that need to be completed through the use of the target
language. In such pedagogies, a communicative goal is identified and the
planning follows a backward design that sets the path towards
supporting and assessing students’ accomplishment of the goal. In short, these
innovative pedagogies put the student at the center stage and,
in addition to effectively promoting language learning, they also foster
creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving skills, and intentional
examination of the world through investigation. Our goal for the CLS 2024 is
to explore how pedagogies focused on experiential learning are
designed and implemented in the classroom.

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