CENTRE FOR ADVANCED STUDY SOFIA
2009/2010 FELLOWSHIP PROGRAMME CALL FOR APPLICATIONS
under the research project
REGIMES OF HISTORICITY AND DISCOURSES OF MODERNITY AND IDENTITY, 1900-1945, IN EAST-CENTRAL, SOUTHEASTERN AND NORTHERN EUROPE
October 2008 – June 2010
Supported
by the Volkswagen Foundation, Germany, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation,
Germany and the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, Sweden.
The
Centre for Advanced Study Sofia (Bulgaria) announces a Call for
Applications for participation in the international project Regimes of
Historicity and Discourses of Modernity and Identity, 1900-1945, in
East-Central, Southeastern and Northern Europe (see Brief Description
below).
General conditions
CAS will
award five research fellowships to scholars working in the area of the
social sciences and humanities for a period of 9 months (1 October 2009
– 30 June 2010). The programme envisages individual research and
participation in two working sessions and one extended colloquium.
Non-Bulgarian Fellows can spend in-residence research periods of
varying length in Sofia (negotiable in each individual case).
The
selected Fellows will receive a monthly fellowship of 750 Euro
(including travel allowance and research expenses). The Centre for
Advanced Study Sofia provides the academic, organisational and
administrative support for the research. All technical and library
facilities of the Centre are available to the Fellows.
Deadline for applications: 20 April 2009
Eligibility
•
Scholars working in the social sciences and/or the humanities from any
country, holders of a doctoral degree or at the final stage of
fulfilling the requirements for such a degree;
• Applicants may not be older than 45 years of age at the start of the fellowship period;
•
The applicants proposals should fall into the thematic area of the
project. Please see the Full Research Description enclosed (PDF).
Working language and language skill requirements
The
Fellows will work in an international research team, where all
discussions, workshops and other events will be in English, as should
be the final research paper to be submitted for publication. Only
applicants fluent in English (oral and written) will be considered and
a certificate or another proof of language proficiency is highly
recommended.
The application package must be submitted in English by e-mail to the contact person indicated below and must include:
1.
Research proposal (no more than 1500 – 1800 words) including: • a short
description of the planned research, • methodology, • contribution to
the overall research aims of the Regimes of Historicity project, •
general framework of interpretation; • selected bibliography (10-15
works) on the topic.
2. Brief (1 page max.) scientific
self-evaluation of the applicant (demonstrating the applicants
potential to go significantly beyond the state of the art, a
presentation of the content of the scholarly contributions of the
applicant to his/her own research field; the recognition and diffusion
that these contributions have received: publications, citations or
appropriate equivalents, students/international prizes and awards,
institution-building, other);
3. CV and list of publications;
4. Optional: a relevant text (chapter of a dissertation, publication, etc.) of up to 25 pages;
5. Names and contact details of 2 referees.
Selection procedure
The
selection will be carried out by the CAS Academic Advisory Council, an
international body composed of prominent scholars in the social
sciences and the humanities. The final results will be announced in
May, 2009 via email to the applicants and on the Centres website: www.cas.bg.
Criteria
governing the selection • innovative insights • interdisciplinary
approach • comparative approach • relation to the overall thematic
framework of the project • important publications on the topic or in a
related field.
Detailed information about the Centre for
Advanced Study Sofia and the project Regimes of Historicity and
Discourses of Modernity and Identity, 1900-1945, in East-Central,
Southeastern and Northern Europe is available at www.cas.bg.
Please, email your application package not later than 20th April 2009 to:
Mr Dimiter Dimov
Project Coordinator
e-mail: [email protected]
Centre for Advanced Study Sofia
70 Neofit Rilski Str.
Sofia 1000, Bulgaria
tel.: + 359 2 9803704 / fax: + 359 2 9803662
Regimes of Historicity and Discourses of Modernity and Identity, 1900-1945, in East-Central, Southeastern and Northern Europe
BRIEF INTRODUCTION
The
Regimes of Historicity project focuses on the comparative analysis of
the various ideological traditions thematising the connection between
modernity and historicity – a connection lying at the core of modern
identity-narratives in the post-romantic era (1900-1945) – in three
“small-state” regions: East-Central, Southeastern, and Northern Europe.
The choice of ideologies as the vantage point of our research involves
visions of past and future, of continuity and discontinuity in a wide
spectrum of twentieth-century social and political thinking about
modernity and identity. Above all, we plan to concentrate on the ways
these traditions have been shaped and interpreted by the different
branches of the humanities and the newly formed social sciences. This
will make it possible to reconsider the usual metaphors rooted in
temporal dimensions that are used for non-core Western cultures, such
as asynchrony, backwardness, catching-up, whose moral and normative
implications have been at the core of modernist and anti-modernist
discourses ever since the dawn of the twentieth century. The process of
cultural appropriation and mediation will be a central axis of
investigation pointing to the complex interplay of local traditions and
“imported” ideological packages. Extending two regional comparative
paradigms – the long-standing Sudostforschung and the more recent
Nordic Spaces research – the project undertakes a comparison across
historical regions testing for regional peculiarities and common
European phenomena. This is also seen as opening up the possibility for
formulating heuristic regional typologies, looking at the specific
mechanisms of framing modernity in Southeastern, Central and Northern
Europe.
As it is known, the entire discussion of regional
differences (e.g. between East, West, North, Centre, Southeast, etc.)
has been typically framed in terms of temporality – in notions such as
backwardness, overtaking, progress and so on. Our reconstruction of the
patterns of historicity – of the temporal visions historical actors
held of their own contexts – seeks to challenge the centre-periphery
backwardness narrative and render a more balanced picture of historical
difference. We also see our research as offering an alternative to
post-colonial narratives, which focus on the fundamental difference of
the European core and the other, in that in our case the whole
framework of otherness is relativised and fine-tuned. Comparing the
various peripheries to each other could give us a certain insight into
the issue of legacies – into the way tradition is framed in a
Protestant, Orthodox or Muslim context; or in the long-term impact of
competing post-imperial and nation-state models of framing the past. We
thus hope to develop a relativised but not necessarily relativist
vision of political modernity capable to substantiate the vision of
multiple modernities and thus open up the discussion of how imported
models and local traditions are related to each other.
The
two-year research agenda will be accomplished via four closely
interrelated components that allow for the deeper and more
comprehensive understanding of the theoretical problems in focus:
Senior Fellowship Programme, Junior Fellowship Programme, Extended
Colloquia and Guest-Scholar Programme. The Regimes of Historicity
Fellows will work on their individual case studies and come together
for joint working sessions, colloquia and conferences to discuss each
others findings in the multidisciplinary and international environment
provided by the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia. The core group of 10
junior scholars who will be selected via an open Call for Applications
will be supervised by the project convenor Prof. Dr Diana Mishkova and
the senior Fellows – researchers with extensive experience in the
thematic field.