Стипендии „Герда Хенкел“

When war broke out in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts of Ukraine in 2014, numerous charitable organizations, local and international NGOs and development aid programs began to offer immediate humanitarian relief in frontline communities. Today, eight years since the start of the war, their active engagement remains a valuable contribution to peacebuilding efforts and social assistance to the most vulnerable social categories. At the same time, pressure from donors and priorities of long-term engagement beyond short-term immediate relief, pushes the humanitarian sector to redefine their understanding of “vulnerability”. Development aid projects are gradually moving away from material assistance in the form of basic necessities, towards more long-term projects of community development, capacity-building, resilience and empowerment. My research project is situated in this context of international development actors redefining vulnerability in frontline communities of the Donbas. I want to explore, firstly, which social groups are identified as vulnerable and in greatest need of humanitarian assistance; secondly – how these understandings of vulnerability evolve over time when the war is no longer seen as an emergency but rather as an ongoing day-to-day reality in frontline communities, and finally – how changing understandings of vulnerability reflect ideological and bureaucratic shifts in the development aid sector.

In the mid-19th century, the Russian imperial government built a theatre in Tbilisi, the administrative center of its Caucasian colony, with the aim of advancing the civilizing mission in the Empire’s “Oriental” periphery. Funded by a local Armenian merchant, the building was simultaneously the first-ever European proscenium theatre in the region and a multistoried caravanserai. It thus formed the site of uneasy entanglement of fundamental concerns about art, economy, and public life as negotiated between Russian and local agents of empire, merchants, artists or the nascent Georgian nationalist intelligentsia. Retracing the evolution of the theatre-caravanserai from its conception in 1846 to its destruction by a fire in 1874, this research project explores the civilizational ambitions with which imperial agents invested it as well as the contingencies and contradictions of its usages throughout its existence. The theatre-caravanserai provides a privileged vantage point for exploring how modernity came to be projected and experienced at a moment of great modernizational hopes for the Empire’s Caucasian periphery. To do justice to the complexity of the object itself, the research project will combine insights from opera studies, art history, new imperial history, literary studies, social and cultural history and historical ethnography.

In a period of state reconstruction and bureaucratization, non-Muslim officials' employment is an essential feature of the expanding modern Ottoman bureaucracy. It is a generally shared observation but has not been tested thoroughly by resorting to quantitative methods and archival materials. My project deals with a solid and consistent sample involving a coherent group with representative characteristics of the bureaucracy and its Christian and Jewish members. I recently completed a three-year-project aiming to identify non-Muslim officials. All Christians (Armenian, Greek, Bulgarian etc.) and Jews employed in the civil administration were part of the research spectrum. The statistical survey's primary basis was the personnel registers kept in 1879-1914, consisting of 201 large volumes that provided information on 52,000 Ottoman officials. We find out that almost 3.000 non-Muslims (5.7% of total) worked in the Ottoman civil service. Within this project's framework, Dr. Kirmizi will examine the social and educational backgrounds and careers of Christian officials. The aim is to better understand the Christian officials' position in the Ottoman bureaucracy and their roles in it.

The project reconstructs the history of the literary theory and criticism in Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s and early 1930s in its close connection with the theoretical achievements of Russian formalism. The aim of the research is to demonstrate how the project of radical “modernization” of Ukrainian literature with the help of literary technique was used for the construction of the new national identity in the 1920s. The project deepens our understanding of political, cultural and intellectual history of Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s. On that basis, the cultural-historical and ideological context of the history of Ukrainian literary criticism and literature of the late 19th – first decades of the 20th century is consistently reconstructed. It offers a conceptually new reading of the literary and theoretical material of the 1920s. The success of this project will set a new benchmark in the historical narrative about modern and contemporary Ukraine. The project is based on the unique Ukrainian and Russian archival materials from the 1920s–1930s which are introduced into scientific circulation for the first time.

The research project focuses on the materialization of fictional hagiographic figures in late antiquity (3rd-7th centuries AD) that found embodiment in the sacred topography of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. It is especially interested in female holy figures, who are literary characters in their origin, such as Pelagia the Penitent, Mary of Egypt, and Susanna of Eleutheropolis. This project is twofold. It will first explore the construction of gender fluidity and ambivalence in the Lives in order to understand the registers of late ancient gender, gendered performances, as well as the gendering of virtue, spiritual progress, and asceticism, as integral to the construction of early Christian identity (objective 1). It will review, metacritically, the feminist theoretical apparatus that hagiography critics bring to bear on the vitae. The second part of the project looks at the embodiment of the saints and materialization of their cult places as reflected in sacred architecture of the Holy Land (objective 2). It concentrates on the connection between late antique hagiography and establishment of the saints’ holy places of Palestine as well as superposition of sacred spaces and holy sites. In late antiquity, these three women entered the liturgical calendar of the Byzantine Church and received places of worship in Jerusalem, visited by Western and Eastern pilgrims from the early Middle Ages onwards. It is this localized production of these ideological narratives and associated cultic sites that is to be specified historically.

European influence on Russian religious sphere, and particularly on monasticism and monastic practices of Early Modern time if of great interest to historians and philologists. Monastic preaching and practices connected with death preparation, that is writing of testaments and giving donations to churches and monasteries, are a seminal source for study of cultural transfer and ideology. The project is devoted to the study of funeral piety of Russian monastics of the second half of the 17th century in a broader European context. It addresses origins of these practices, the ways in which they were transferred to Russia mainly through Polish culture which served as a mediator, and then adopted by Russian monastics. Drawing on interconnection of various disciplines and directions of research, the project will provide materials and knowledge for building a wider perspective on European cultural transfer that shaped cultural ground in Early Modern Russia.

The project examines immunization through the figure of Charlie Chaplin, which dominated early-Soviet discourses on cinema as a means of promoting healthy work culture for the proletariat. Like vaccination, which was an important tool of managing the masses in a country where health was rapidly re-conceptualised as a state concern, cinema was expected to play an important role in moulding the Soviet worker. The purpose of the project is to explore the theoretical potential of vaccination and immunity, which were employed in literature and film theory of the first decade after the Russian revolution to construct film as a kinaesthetic tool of labour education. Through this apparatus, Chaplin became an unlikely agent of “labour vaccination.” Methodologically, the project is inspired by a relatively recent turn towards the history of biosciences in literary studies and film studies. I argue that Chaplin’s position in Soviet culture acquires unique theoretical significance when seen in conjunction with theories that advocate cinema as a tool of ideological vaccination capable of transmitting knowledge about bodily efficiency and labour optimization. Through an interdisciplinary approach my book and accompanying articles will uncover a largely neglected area of Soviet film and cultural history, showing how earlier constructions of vaccination helps us reconsider current discourses of bio-cultural contagion.

This project is about discovery of natural history by the educated residents, petty nobility and gentry ( szlachta), in the Volhynian and Podolian provinces of the Russian empire in the late 18th – first third of the 19th century. Following the incorporation of these lands into the administrative structure of the empire, local amateurs unveiled their interest and contemplated the necessity to study the natural world of their provinces. In order to do so, they turned to the well-known works on natural history by the French, German, and Swedish scientists. However, Volhynian and Podolian provincial botanists not only appropriated foreign knowledge but also laid emphasis on promulgation of local natural novelties for the benefit of the world, an emphasis they believed necessary given the social and political reality of their region – the annexation, Napoleon’s presence, and continuous military upheavals. Through discussing practices and agendas of local naturalists in the most western provinces of the Russian empire, the project tackles the problem of (un)equal distribution of knowledge, the problem of the transfer of ideas and their cultural (dis)placement in the long 18th – first third of the 19th century. Examination of scientific pursuits in the Polish provinces also exposes the many (re)presentations of the global Enlightenment in Eastern Europe, uncovering the regional dynamics of this movement through the lens of natural history and science.

The project deals with transnational history of the East European ‘lost generation’ during the period of the Great War, revolution/s and the Civil War in Russia and beyond, as well as early interwar period. Based on the historical material (archives and ego-documents), the project aims on identifying some typological features in the biographies of the representatives of the East European ‘lost generation’ that would help explain the existence (or absence) of a collective identity. It investigates how this experience determined reintegration of the former soldiers and captives into society and their further lives both in home and host countries. Their resocialization in the post-war period was marked by the experience of return (in many cases they had to choose another country of residence) and the associated problems of adaptation and communication (language, culture, traditions) as well as profession in new post-war conditions. The second part of the project focuses on the history of transnational communities that emerged as a result of the war and revolution/s. Transnational communities are understood as social groups that emerge out of interactions over national borders, and oriented around a common project or ‘imagined’ identity. One of the objectives is to conceptualize the link between the individual biographical cases and more general questions via the concepts of transnationalism and transnational history.

This research explores Europe-based highly-skilled Turkish migrants’ everyday-life experiences in; a) work places, b) wider social community and, c) wider Turkish diaspora community. The project focuses on the narratives of individual identity vis-à-vis the general group identity (i.e. Turkish diaspora in their respective European host society and the host society) and how they build/maintain alternative social networks based on such perceptions, social statuses and professions. The research focuses on the highly-skilled Turkish community in Germany, Sweden and Netherlands, wherein Turkish diasporas are dominant. The study explores the production of alternative diaspora spaces in migrants’ social environments and digital spheres through mixed methods (i.e. life-story interviews,surveys, digital ethnography). The premise is, highly-skilled migrants experience cultural rejection from the Turkish diaspora groups, hence look for ways to culturally integrate themselves to the wider European society. Theoretically, the aim is to establish ‘alternative diasporas’ as a concept wherein individuals have more contested feelings/attachments towards their native communities and ‘given’ identities whilst they pursue the interest of connecting with others who share similar interests,lifestyles and ethics. The overall objective is to explore how these highly-skilled migrants blur/sharpen the boundaries of such in/out-group status with the native diaspora community and the host society.