Deadline: March 12, 2025
The weeks since January 20, 2025 have shocked the world with breathtaking failures to learn from history. From a second Munich Agreement to an American withdrawal from global engagements that recalls Mikhail Gorbachev’s pullbacks after 1988, repetition of the past has abruptly ended an eighty-year period of world history. If Mark Twain was right that “history rhymes,” it is clearly rhyming too much.
Central and eastern Europe have seen some of the most instructive precedents for today’s developments. Their history can therefore help us understand what is happening and how our future might unfold. Recognizing the moment’s urgency, Canadian Slavonic Papers invites proposals for relevant papers that might be included in flash forum to be published this summer.
Papers—from any disciplinary perspective—might address such questions as:
• What historical periods are ending in 2025, why, and with what significance?
• How can historical parallels help us understand what is happening and how the free world should respond?
• In what ways might the experiences of past resistance movements prove instructive in the present?
• How can rhetorical shifts destabilize systems of meaning, as in the demise of Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union? How does the unthinkable become thinkable?
• How are current events changing our views of past phenomena, such as Nazi and Communist seizures of power, appeasement, and programs for a “third way”?
• How can theories of technological civilization, class conflict, imperialism, or totalitarianism help us understand the present moment?
• What methods should we adopt in thinking and teaching about history comparatively?
• As the world we have known comes to an end, how can the history of central and eastern Europe guide our hopes for a world to come?
Prospective authors should submit proposals of up to 250 words to csp@ualberta.ca by March 12, 2025. Proposals, like final manuscripts, may be written in English or French. Initial decisions will be made by March 15, and authors invited to proceed will be asked to submit drafts for expedited peer review by April 30. Authors of mss. recommended for publication will then have a month to prepare final drafts of 5,000 to 9,000 words (including references).
Inquiries may be addressed to the Editors at csp@ualberta.ca. Canadian Slavonic Papers, founded in 1956, is open to authors in all humanities and social science disciplines around the world. At 1.3, it has one of the highest impact factors in the field. For more information about the journal, please see https://slavists.ca/journal/csp.