CALL FOR PAPERS
Transcending Borders in Europe and Eurasia
Conference dates: 28 and 29 February 2020
DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS EXTENDED TO 10 January 2020.
Click here to view this call for papers as a PDF.
The Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (CERES) at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto is pleased to announce that it will host its annual Graduate Student Conference on 28 and 29 February 2020. The conference, “Transcending Borders in Europe and Eurasia,” will be held at the Munk School. Prof. Kristin Kopp of the University of Missouri will deliver the keynote address.
This year’s conference will explore interdisciplinary scholarship on the role of borders in Europe from 1900 to the present. Borders of territory, identity, and politics in Europe and Eurasia have experienced tumultuous transformations throughout this period. Amidst the wreckage of two world wars, territories and the people who inhabited them were redefined. The fall of communism in 1989 led to a blurring of prevailing east-west divisions, as many eastern Europeans moved west in the hopes of a brighter economic future. In the last decade, Hungary has intensified its irredentist rhetoric against neighbouring states, and Russia proved that such rhetoric is still being put into practice with its invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014. The refugee crisis in 2015 saw the changing views of free movement across Europe, and borders of identity within EU countries also shifted. In 2016, Britain voted to leave the European Union, a move that threatens to inflict perhaps the most detrimental change to date to the political borders of Europe Union. Thus, questions about borders, borderlands, and identity remain relevant in Europe and Eurasia to the present day.
These themes will be addressed in four broadly conceived panels:
- Power and Protest in the Aftermath of Empire: Panelists will discuss the shifted borders and transformed political systems that resulted from the collapse of empires during the First World War, with a particular emphasis on revolutions, uprisings, and civil wars.
- Ambiguity and Imagination in European Borderlands: Panelists will discuss the issue of identity in borderlands, including national ambiguity and indifference, citizen identity versus state identity, and the ways in which inhabitants of borderlands react to shifting political demarcation.
- Transnational Memory in Contemporary Europe: Panelists will discuss how memory cultures have developed in transnational contexts and how transnational memory operates in the aftermath of empire and state collapse. Examples include (but are not limited to) transnational memory in the territories once controlled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia.
- Crossing Borders: Migration in Europe after 1989: Panelists will discuss east-to-west European migration after 1989, the 2015 refugee crisis and its aftermath, and the integration of migrants into contemporary Europe.
Submission Guidelines
Current MA and PhD students are encouraged to submit a proposal. Proposals may originate in any discipline. Authors of accepted papers will be invited to present their work.
Please submit a short paper proposal (500 words max.) outlining the thesis, method, and relevance of the paper to the conference topic. Please include a short biography (academic title, affiliation, research interests).
Invited presenters may be eligible for modest financial assistance to cover travel or accommodation costs on a case by case basis. Please indicate in your submission if you require funding to cover travel or accommodation costs in order to participate in the conference.
The proposal deadline is 10 January 2020.
Submit proposals to ceresgsu@gmail.com
This conference is sponsored in part by the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies and the DAAD with funds from the German Federal Foreign Office (AA).
