100 YEARS SINCE MODERN INDEPENDENCE AND UNIFICATION IN BALTIC SEA REGION AND EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE

The programme of the conference which will take place in Târgoviște on November 15-16, 2018 can be downloaded from here.

The conference continues and develops a project that the Romanian Association for Baltic and Nordic Studies (ARSBN) initiated in 2010, aiming at investigating, comparing and describing the relations, encounters, intersections, confluences, mutual influences and/or parallels between the Nordic and Baltic Sea areas, on the one hand, and the Black Sea Region, on the other hand. The project was structured in annual international conferences.

The 2018 conference focuses on the historical, cultural, social, economic processes which led in the Baltic Sea Region to the independence of Finland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and Poland, to the unification of Romania and the independence of Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary and Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (Yugoslavia) in East-Central Europe and the consequences of the reshaping of the entire region from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea and Adriatic. Several other political entities created at the end of the World War I such as Ukraine, Georgia or Litbel succumbed after barely living for a few months or years of existence. How did the changes of borders and belonging affect the human communities living in the area and what impact it had beyond the region on the short, medium and long-run? How war and peace-making were experienced in this region and how did they influence the changes of political geography? How the processes of independence and unification reverberated throughout the region and how state and non-state actors reflected, echoed and reacted to this structural transformation of the area? How is this metamorphosis resonating in historical memory, the politics of memory and cultural identity, in historical narratives, including competing narratives, and in the use of history in identity politics a century after the guns were silenced? How is literature permeated by the changes occurring at the end of the war to end all wars in the region? How are art, architecture, patrimony, in general, capturing the message of those tremendous transformations? Places of commemoration, autobiographies, biographies and memoirs, empiric or theoretical research relevant to the conference’s topic may also be the focal point of the submitted papers.

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