Workshops 2024/2025

Summary of the proposal:

The 4th Central European Graduate Conference in Ancient Philosophy, hosted by Humboldt University Berlin, continues a series of earlier conferences that took place at ELTE and CEU in Budapest (2017), at Charles University Prague (2019), and at University of Vienna (2022).

While continuing the tradition, we also aim to broaden the scope of the conference by including not only ancient Greco-Roman philosophy but also its Arabic reception.

The main aim of the conference is to bring together outstanding doctoral students and early-career researchers based in the Central European region. The conference gives them the opportunity to present their innovative projects in front of a distinguished audience. In response to their presentations, the speakers get feedback from well-established scholars who work in related fields of research at one of the five CENTRAL partner universities. Each presentation and response is followed by an open discussion about the issues and questions raised. This connects scholars in the field of Ancient philosophy throughout the Central European academic institutions and positions them in an international area of research and current philosophical debates. The conference format is explicitly interdisciplinary.

We welcome submissions from disciplines such as Philosophy, Classics, Arabic Studies, and History of Science. In addition, two keynote speakers will present and discuss their current research: Prof. Mary Krizan (Bilkent University, Ankara); Dr. Vojtěch Hladký (Charles University, Prague).

Summary of the proposal:

Ancient Egypt is commonly known for spectacular monuments, magnificent artefacts, and captivating texts. Yet, beyond the fascinating beauty of “wonderful things” (H. Carter), all this enshrines plentiful information which bear witness to a great culture, its evolution, and its history. Egyptology is dedicated to unearthing, analysing, and interpreting all different kinds of sources of information; but today, research requires much more than “simply” excavating, cataloguing, or translating. The challenge is therefore to develop, fine-tune, and apply well-established and innovative, but also interdisciplinary methodologies in order to get one step closer to what was at the core of ancient Egyptian culture.

Up-to-date research has to consider old and new material alike; and it is both formerly neglected minutiae and the new big data which may bring about decisive new insights on the small scale or even paradigmatic change on the large scale. Research of this kind always requires attention to detail, the ability to organise huge amounts of information, and to proceed with a fine-grained methodology which combines various approaches and disciplines from archaeology to archaeometry, from history of arts to pictorial sciences, from (text) philology to linguistics, from mythology to religious studies, from cultural studies to social sciences, from anthropology to the natural sciences, and far beyond. Only a plethora of details will allow successfully to address research questions, to develop hypotheses, and to piece together the big picture. In this changing and challenging research landscape, the MA and PhD students of today will shape tomorrow’s Egyptology with new ways of searching, new ways of analysing, and new ways of thinking.

This workshop to be held at the University of Vienna on 3-5 December 2024 aims to bring together MA and PhD students with experienced scholars and researchers in order to initiate a methodological discourse. All workshop participants are invited to reflect on their methodologies with the aid of which they conduct their research, and how they develop and adapt their tool kit. At the same time, participants are strongly encouraged to present the data or material which they investigate, how they apply their methodologies, and what new (preliminary) results they have gained so far or expect soon. We are therefore looking forward to a workshop which will allow to get a sense of what kind(s) of well-established and highly innovative methodologies are currently used and to discuss what potential there is for ongoing and future research to the benefit of all workshop participants and their work on little pieces and the big picture.

Summary of the proposal:

The workshop "Current Issues of Ukrainian Studies in the Light of Multilingualism and European Diversity. Particularities of Central Europe" is planned as an interdisciplinary workshop. Since the beginning of Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine, Ukrainian scholars in Central Europe have been faced with many challenges. Scholars and teachers in Central Europe have been confronted with a number of new problems, the understanding and solution of which require a deep understanding of the culture, history, traditions and mentality of the Ukrainians.

The workshop will be divided into four thematic blocks. The first block will address questions related to the Ukrainian minority and the problems of propaganda impact on the image of Ukraine and its cultural integration into the European Union. The second block will focus on the questions of Ukrainian history, religion and the media image of Ukraine in Central Europe. The third block will address questions related the Ukrainian language and education. The forth block will deal with the popularisation of the Ukrainian literature and culture in Europe.

One of our tasks is to engage young scholars and launch joint research programmes to address current issues in Ukrainian studies. Our main goal is to exchange experiences and find ways to solve the problems of Ukraine's cultural integration into the EU.

Summary of the proposal:

Space is one of the most fundamental conditions of human life, describing the organisation and experience of the worlds in which we live, work and socialise, and in recent years it has become among the most lively areas of study for historians. Slowly we are learning not only about just how different the spatial lives of people in the past could be from our own but also about how these past spaces produced the world we live in today. As we understand the central importance of differences in gender, race and class in shaping our experience of the places around us, we need to look to the past to understand how we got here.

This project focuses on the time period that birthed modernity, the Middle Ages, and a marginalised group, women, whose worlds were profoundly limited, and sometimes liberated, by their gender. They were forbidden from accessing parts of churches, houses and gardens, but could have great control over the organisation of their own, sometimes wealthy and powerful, convents or even specific areas of their homes. Women were often identified with their physical bodies while men were associated with the spaceless soul, but they also turned this division into opportunities for spiritual revelation and textual production in particular spaces and places.

What makes this project special is that it shifts the focus away from writings produced by men, which provide the bulk of our information about medieval space, even about spaces used or perceived by women, and onto the ways women themselves described their environments. By focusing on texts produced by women, we can hear new voices from the past as they describe how they encounter and shape the world around them. This opens up important questions for historians about the differences between the ways men and women understood the organisation of the physical and perceptual environment, the opportunities given by particular places and spaces for power, self-reflection or revelation, and the meaning and significance of the gendered, three-dimensional bodies. This is an important, timely and exciting project that will open up new research opportunities for years to come.

Summary of the proposal:

Humans are in constant motion, and so are things and ideas. These two trilateral workshops in Vienna and Prague will bring together junior and senior scholars working on human movement & migration and on the circulation of goods and ideas to explore the development of new transnational perspectives on the history of Central and Eastern Europe in its global context. They will link up and deepen existing collaborations between the partners on topics of connections and movement in the socialist world and on trade during the Cold War, tying them in with new formats of doctoral education at the University of Vienna.

Summary of the proposal:

Based on the great success of the previous trilateral graduate student workshops in Prague in March 2022 and Vienna in April 2023 (the Warsaw workshop will be carried out in June 2024), we would like to continue and expand our joint activities by inviting a new partner university (Eötves Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary). Each university will be represented by three competitively selected graduate students and 1-2 senior researchers. The main objective of the workshop is to enhance the international academic exchange of PhD students in the humanities and social sciences between four Central European universities. Based on their respective PhD projects, but adapted to the general theme of the workshop, the programme will be based on the US model of short presentations of pre-written papers. This will allow ample time for discussion of each paper.

The workshop will explore topics related to comparative and transnational approaches, focusing on the history of transformations after 1918/1945/1989. A Polanyian perspective will be used to look beyond the Central European region and reach out for global connections.

The three main objectives of the workshop are 1) to enhance the quality of PhD programmes in modern history and related social sciences by strengthening the international exchange of knowledge and skills among PhD students as well as senior researchers in the field; 2) to promote cooperation between four Central European universities (Charles University in Prague, University of Vienna, University of Warsaw, Eötvös Loránd University Budapest); 3) to explore the possibility of further strengthening this cooperation by developing a joint or double degree PhD programme (co-tutelle).

The two-day workshop will take place at Charles University in Prague and will be attended by six senior researchers and 12 PhD students from the partner universities. The event will be organised by Prof. Ota Konrád and Dr. Václav Šmidrkal (Charles University, Prague), Prof. Philipp Ther and Prof. Claudia Kraft (University of Vienna), Prof. Jerzy Kochanowski (University of Warsaw) and Ass. Prof. Márkus Keller (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest).

Summary of the proposal:

Within the CENTRAL project, in which we have been participating since 2016 with annual workshops. In 2025 we will organize an onsite academic workshop in humanities and social sciences, entitled “Materialities of memory in Central, East and South-East Europe", taking place at the University of Warsaw in March 2024. The event – organized by dr Tomasz Rawski (UW) in cooperation with Prof. Christian Voss (HU), doc. Kateřina Králová (CUNI Prague), dr. Jelena Dureinovic (Uni Wien) and doc. Ildikó Barna (ELTE Budapest) – will give the opportunity to present research of both senior and junior scholars, including Ph.D. students as the core group.

This workshop is a follow-up to the previous CENTRAL workshops that focused on transformations of memory cultures and politics, on discourses and narratives of victimhood concurrence, as well as on public memory and the institutionalization of memory.

This workshop will centre on the material aspects and dimensions of memory cultures and politics in contemporary Central, East and South-East Europe. The workshop will, firstly, explore and discuss different material entanglements of social memories, such as their institutional infrastructures, material aspects of exhibition spaces such as museums, production and memorialisation of material objects (national flags, museum souvenir figurines, fragments of Berlin wall, vintage cars etc.), class-based determinants and so on. Secondly, the workshop will attempt at drawing theoretical conclusions on how to take a step beyond social constructivism in memory studies and what are the potential advantages/disadvantages of this step.

One of our core interests lies in the strong belief that exploring material entanglements of social memories can enrich contemporary memory studies and allow them even better describe contemporary dynamics of memory particularly in non-Western context, where political, economic and even military materialities are rapidly striking back in recent years.

The workshop brings together contributions discussing the conceptual approaches and challenges of studying memory in Central and Southeastern Europe and studying concrete sites of memory, mnemonic agents and commemorative practices.

Summary of the proposal:

In this series of workshops scholars from Modern Greek Studies, a field constructed around Greek, a language with a long cultural tradition and at the same time one of the “small” languages of Europe, approach the issue of language and culture contact through the experience of research and teaching in the context of the multilingualisms of Central European universities. We are specialists of migration history, translation theory and practice, and media. The workshops will focus on contemporary bilateral cultural relations and will discuss national book markets and their importance for bilateral translation politics, the interaction between Greek communist political refugees to Eastern Europe after the Greek Civil War (1946-49) and literary and translation structures in former communist countries, the relation between translated literature and the acceptance of new genres in national canons. We will address also non literary "translation" processes discussing “translations of Greekness” by film makers Costa-Gavras, Theo Angelopoulos, and Giorgos Lanthimos. We will finally focus on the multitemporalities of literary digitization, comparing major languages with languages like Greek, where only a small number of the literary output is already digitized and how this influences AI generated texts.