Aleksandra Tobiasz (Relevance of the Humanities Fellowship, Oct ‘25 – Feb ‘26) will give a talk on:

(Central) European Self in the Mirrors of the West and the East – Geopoetic, Sensory Topographies of East-Central Europe

15 January 2026 (Thursday), at 16:30

Moderated by: Andrii Portnov

Abstract: The overarching aim of the research is to problematize the concept of (Central) Europe in a transregional, global perspective in relation to (Latin) America and Russia, Asia through the phenomenological prism of individual experiences of travel and life in exile (self in the mirror of other) among selected contemporary Central European writers. The project distances from the widely spread in the scholarship geopolitical approach to East-Central Europe founded on region-building ideas and identity politics. The emphasis is put on geopoetics and literary self-identifications reshaped in relation to changeable places, cultures and plural temporalities. The research thus tries to address transregional historical experiences of Central European intellectuals (Czesław Miłosz, Andrzej Bobkowski, Joseph Roth, Alma M. Karlin) whose oeuvre was defined by (Latin) American and Asian contexts. The geopoetic approach to Central Europe takes into account negative categories and particular articulations of being a (Central) European shaped in time of historical discontinuities and crises. Consequently, the research follows Simona Škrabec’s literary (particularizing) approach to Central Europe which avoids essentializing and generalizing ways of defining this region present in historical (unifying) perspective. Whereas historical narrative can explain geopolitical, top-down projects of Central Europe, literary texts reveal “an unorthodox” (Miljenko Jergović) experienced side of the region resembling a heretic space (Andrzej Stasiuk). Focus on literature allows also to notice some attempts to reconfigure the imagined spatial coordinates of Central Europe replacing the twentieth-century West-East geopolitical dichotomy of the desired western culture and rejected eastern politics with the geopoetic North-South vectors. The presentation will address some questions about the ways particular places and thus different cultural contexts, characterized by divergent orders of time influenced the perceptions of round-the-world traveler Alma M. Karlin, her self-understanding and image of (Central) Europe.