Completed Programmes

Project Description and Contribution to CAS ROH Project

The proposed research focuses on modernity and identity discourses in the writing of Muslim reformist and modernist thinkers in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the period of 1900-1945, and specifically on the so-called ‘Muslim woman question' in their work. This term refers to a set of questions related to the position Muslim women should occupy in society. Writings of both modernists and traditionalists writing at the time are replete with symptoms of an identity crisis, which they were trying to resolve through ‘their' women, to use their own rhetoric. They were influenced by both Austrian, and later Yugoslav ideas of modernisation, as well as by Islamic modernist thinkers in the Muslim world, especially Egypt and Turkey. The aim of the research is to explore the intersection between these different yet interrelated modernist discourses that formed around the crucible of adapting Islamic practices to changing political, social and cultural circumstances, and to look into the phenomenon of Islamic modernism in Bosnia-Herzegovina as one of double translation or hybridisation.

As they defended education and the unveiling of women, modernists were long believed to be defending women's liberation. However, what they were advocating actually involved the reinscription of domestic and reproductive functions of women. The changes that were brought forth by modernisation not only offered women new liberatory potentials but implied new forms of subjection, too. Connected to this is the reconceptualisation of mothering and the family, a phenomenon that has been commonly linked to nationalist issues. (Educated and unveiled) women were to be the up-bringers of responsible and capable (male) citizens and (male) members of the nation. This turn modernist thinking took in many countries - emerging nation-states, in particular. However, the situation in Bosnia was quite different. The type of nationalism espoused by certain modernist writers was in a atypical position, one which will be explored as part of this research project.

The research proposal complements the general framework of the Regimes of Historicity Project as it focuses on the responses to and adaptation of a somewhat imposed modernity in a specific Southeast European location, and on a variety of modernisation accounts aiming to overcome an imagined time lag and perceived backwardness. In addition, the inclusion of the gender and religion aspects, are believed to contribute favourably to a wider understanding of modernisation processes.

Research Project Description

Questions concerning tradition have fundamentally marked the discourses of modernity in twentieth-century Serbia. The processes of constructing national identity and utilising tradition have been defined by complex relations between diverse local traditions and different models of their perception, which were heavily dependent upon distinctive visions of the nation's prospects. A fundamental issue of any comprehensive survey of discourses of modernity and identity in twentieth-century Serbia is to explore the nature of these relations - generally elucidated by François Hartog's concept of Regimes of Historicity. One can assume that the Serbian national community constituted the mechanics and economy of its past from the standpoint of its present and, more particularly, from the vision of the nation's future.

A general tentative assumption of my research proposal reflects the idea that it was exactly the desirable image of the nation's future, which generated the construction and interpretation of Serbia's national history over the course of the first half of the twentieth century. A thorough and systematical exploration of this problem presents the primary objective of my proposed work.

Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, national history in Serbia was predominantly conceptualised according to some complex perceptions of Byzantine culture and Byzantine heritage - the latter becoming focal to any interpretation of Serbian history, its culture and identity, and permeating the diversity of disciplinary regimes. Multifaceted and changeable historical relations were re-interpreted along stereotypical formulations - the latter meant to confirm an ‘innate' closeness between Serbian and Byzantine culture and thus establish the important and ideologically potent idea of cultural continuity. The nationalisation of history by appropriating Byzantine heritage and constructing the nation's ‘golden age' (a common topoi in the landscape of modern national identities of the Region), based on the implicit formula ‘Glory to come - glory in history', served a number of ideological functions and backed the political interests of the national elite. It was the image of Serbia as an evolutionised Byzantium, that was recognised as capable to sublime and evolve its underlying traditions of the Greek and Roman antiquity and, hence, legitimate itself as civilised and developable.

The core of the proposed research is to explore the discursive mechanisms that generated those complex relations between a perceived and nationalised Byzantine legacy and, on the other hand, examine the imported models of interpretation within the discourse of modernity and identity-building processes, which marked Serbia between c.1900 and the late 1940s. A working hypothesis of my study is to look for the drive for such temporal intervention in at least two ideological functions, namely, to legitimise the expansionist ideologies of the modern Serbian elite, and culturally de-stigmatise modern Serbia as an underdeveloped and uncivilised country. The general research framework will concentrate on the discursive mechanisms of this ‘temporalisation of history' in the academic disciplines - history and architecture, in particular - as they were vital for enforcing the thesis of a so-called Serbo-Byzantine Style based on common, European formulas of progress and evolution of the nation-states.

Research Project Description

My project is to research Romanian-language life-narratives from the period 1880-1945; to analyse their contribution to regimes of historical consciousness in Romanian culture; and to place them in the broader comparative context of global research into life narratives and personal identity.

Research in the broader field of Southeast European Studies has mainly considered collective identities - notably class, ethnicity and religion. In this context, much has been said about the role of historiographical narratives in constructing such identities. Less attention has been paid, however, to historical narratives, which present individual life stories or personal experiences of identity; despite the fact that individual motivations may lie behind the creation of many of the important written sources which historians use to talk about collective identities or alterities. Nor has this apparently ‘literary' problem been much attended to by literary historians. Although such narratives exist in vast numbers in most East European literary cultures, analysis of them is absent from nearly all standard literary histories, which focus heavily on the novel, poetry and drama. My key aim is to theorise life narratives as a ‘public identity interface', a site where an individual's multiple identities and allegiances both result from encounters with the wider world, and at the same time produce a portrait of that world - ‘the world through which I have passed'. Individual narratives therefore both reflect some engagement with wider social realities, and constitute themselves as a site from which judgement is passed on those realities. This autobiographical process has been seen as foundational to historical understanding.

My framework of interpretation will draw on ideas from the classic theorists of ‘historicity regimes' (Koselleck, Rüsen, White, Hartog). It is proposed to place these ideas - principally about temporality, emplotment and orientation - in a broader context of ideas about narrative, as developed principally by literary theorists and narratologists. A special focus will be placed on the relationship between temporal and spatial regimes, in an attempt to rectify the so-called ‘devaluation of place in social science' and ‘the neglect of space in the study of narrative'. Specifically within the framework of the project, I plan to execute two foundational studies. I am less attempting a global survey of the field than investigating a series of emblematic sites from which it may usefully be viewed.

First, a baseline of ‘life-narrative' construction in modern Romanian culture will be established by analysing two ‘canonical' texts in Romanian literature and paradigmatic spatial-temporal representations of personal life experience in Ion Ghica's Letters to Vasile Alecsandri and Ion Creangă's Memories from Childhood. Their personal contribution to the consolidation of national memory, in the form of semi-‘official' autobiographies in the decade following national independence will be of particular interest to my work. Viewed as world-building narratives, Ghica and Creangă's texts can shed critical light on the tradition-modernity dichotomy so frequently invoked in the interpretation of Romanian culture.

Second, I propose a new analysis of the concepts of temporal and spatial experience in the writings of the young Mircea Eliade, who displayed in early youth a pronounced obsession both with space and ‘spiritual itineraries' in a variety of literary modes. This was related to an explicitly proclaimed project to move beyond the national in Romania's post-1918 period and concentrate at once on personal experience and themes of universal significance. So far, Eliade's work has both been interpreted positively as ‘having discovered a wavelength on which spirit of place can communicate with the spirit of the wider world', but also denounced as symptomatic of an egocentric nationalism. My more specific interest here is in considering how this theorist and historian of religions, who in his classic 1957 work on The Sacred and the Profane placed sacred space on a prior plane to that of time, represented his experience of formative encounter with the wider world to his narrower linguistic community, through the medium of life narrative, thus producing a portrait of all three objects: self, community, world. My working thesis is that the third of these objects is narrated to the second through the medium (and interests) of the first.

Project Outline

The history of Montenegrin identity debates in the first half of the twentieth century has been relatively little known even to Balkan specialists. However, competing visions of the country’s past and future, the increasingly contested nature of national identity of the predominantly Orthodox population (defined either as Serb or exclusively Montenegrin) and other themes of intellectual debates deserve more attention for their relevance in the wider ex-Yugoslav, Balkan and East European contexts. This interesting but generally overlooked history of Montenegrin intellectual debates in the first half of the 20th century provides several new examples of historical myths and narratives, competing national projects, visions of past and future, discursive battles over identity, cases of domestication and transformation of ‘Western’ ideas and concepts. Hence, the research project aims at

• A careful reconstruction of the emerging identity discourses in Montenegro between 1900 and 1945;
• An analysis of their strategies, origins, and contribution to the modernity debates there, and the ways they influenced economic reasoning;
• The documentation of the spread of European ideas in early-twentiethcentury Montenegro (especially those of an alleged racial purity), resulting from multifaceted receptions, domestication processes, and intraregional transfers there.

At a wider scale, the project hopes to contribute to a better understanding of the intellectual history of Yugoslavia. Montenegro was often regarded as a peripheral part of the ‘Serb ethnic space’; nevertheless, its distinctive political history and perceived racial qualities of its population significantly influenced the development of modern concepts of Serbian identity.

The research proposes a new assessment of the Montenegrin material, which can provide some fresh insights especially in comparison with other cases of ‘delayed’ and similarly contested ethnic groups throughout the Region (Macedonians, Bosniaks/Muslims, Ruthenes etc.), and whose modern national identity developed during the twentieth century.

Project Outline

The research project attempts to deal with the modernist and nationalist discourses in Turkish and Greek musicological traditions in the first half of the twentieth century. Its interdisciplinary research agenda is an extension of my PhD thesis on The Cultural Identifications of the Greek Urban Elite: Discourse on Music in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Constantinople, in which I try to elucidate the process of formation of a conception of Greek identity through musical discourse.

Starting from the first decades of the twentieth century, Turkish intellectuals appropriated a discourse of progressivism regarding the music of the Ottoman court. Especially after the foundation of the new State, this discourse converged with a temporal judgment of ‘belatedness’, which was defined against the centuries-old polyphonic tradition of the West. This study tracks down the nationalist ideological formulations and the strategies of defending a reformist agenda in cultural politics, through an analysis of the canonised texts of Turkish musical scholarship.

Both Turkish and Greek musicians of the post-romantic period (1900-1945) admired the representatives of the nationalist music schools of Russia and northern Europe for their usage of folkloric elements. The project analyses the musicological concepts that came into use during the period 1900-1945 in Turkey and Greece, with regard to their relationships to the general communicational framework and the discursive field in which they were employed. The latter bore the impact of certain cultural and historical peculilaries of the two countries under investigation, where certain notions of temporality like a constant expression of ‘lagging behind’ the European nations prevailed.

By presenting the writings of the Turkish and Greek musicians of the period 1900- 1945, the proposed research intends to provide an insight for a better understanding of the making of national traditions after the dissolution of the continental Empires. A comparison of the Turkish and Greek texts - read in an innivative, diachronic and comprehensive way - is expectd to yield interesting observations regarding the rationalist, romantic or other approaches toward music in Turkey and Greece.

Project Outline

The proposed research is based on the discussion of the postulate that the Methodenstreit, which broke out after the publication of the Deutsche Geschichte by German historian Karl Lamprecht in 1891, was not a German but a transnational event, though having different political connotations in various European countries and the Westernising world.

The proposed research project investigates the complex interplay of local traditions and ‘imported’ intellectual products of the Lamprecht controversy, which reached Finland in the very beginning of the twentieth century. The emphasis is placed on the appropriation and mediation of the Lamprechtian ideas in early twentieth-century Finnish historiography as reflected in the first Finnish historical journal, Historiallinen Aikakauskirja, and debates at the Historical Association of Finland.

While previous research done on the subject has (fully justifiably) emphasised the nationalistic aspects of the Finnish Lamprechtianism, the proposed project would like to broaden the scope and include its transnational dimension. Hence, three goals have been formulated:

• to explore the Methodenstreit evoked by Lamprecht and the further developments of the Lamprechtian paradigm of historical scholarship as a part of the transnational reconfiguration of the ideological landscape of the period;
• to analyse how the Finnish Lamprechtianists debate dealt with the questions of modernity and identity, inherently related to the reconceptualisation of the ‘national self’;
• to study the complex processes of cultural transfer and appropriation in Europe, by starting out with a scholar such as Lamprecht, who was almost totally rejected in his native German Reich but, nevertheless, cherished in the ‘small-state’ regions of Eastern and Northern Europe.

As a contribution to the overall research goals of the Regimes of Historicity project, the proposed project aims at investigating the complex interplay between national and transnational horizons as well as the border-crossing nature of ideas and of intellectuals as a group. Considering the popularity of Lamprechtianism in various European ‘small-states’, this study may also serve as a basis for establishing connections between traditions which were not having a direct impact on each other but were participating in comparable projects of ‘domesticating’ modernity.

Moreover, the proposed project questions the conventional, modernist model of cultural transfer, which assumes a rather passive assimilation of new ideas, conceived in the ‘dynamic centre‘, and leading the way for an assimilating ‘periphery’. Instead, it views cultural appropriation and mediation as bearing witness to a highly creative process, in which – due to adjustments to a new environment, alterations occurring in the transmitted messages, and the crossing of linguistic frontiers – initial Central European ideas grew out of their conception and essentially diverged from their origin. Since such creative appropriations in small European nations are usually ignored by international research, the proposed project hopes to contribute to a more balanced picture of historical differences and multiple modernities in Europe.

Project Outline

The process of modernisation, acculturation and secularisation of the Jewish communities in Europe has been traditionally described in analogous terms, regardless of the community or country analysed. Nevertheless, recent studies have prompted that this generic process might have varied for each country or case-study, according to the specificity of each Jewish community involved, and the corresponding cultural, religious, political, and socio-economic peculiarities of the particular Gentile society in question. The topic of the proposed research places the historicity frame represented by the generational debate and its perception as a concept at the crossroad of modernisation, identity debate and its representation.

Comparisons between the Central European and Romanian modernisation and Jewish identity pattern in generational terms suggests a permanent tension between he cultural, political and social conditions set by the specificity of the Jewish, but also Gentile communities in both cases. Hence, by focusing on the generational identity changes representedpublicly and debated intellectually, the proposed research work analyses the connection between modernity and historicity to be found at the core of the identity discourses among the Jewish intellectuals of Romanian languages during the interwar period. It aims to connect debates on modernity, historicity, and identity in a larger equation relevant for both the Jewish Romanian intellectual life, and Romanian history in the interwar historiography. By building on the cultural instrumentalisation of the concept of generation, the proposed research hopes to reach roader conclusions in terms of the social, cultural and political life during the interwar period.

Project Outline

Despite several decades of intensive research, the study of fascism as a major political phenomenon of the twentieth century is still far from reaching its endpoint. While the literature on paradigmatic cases such as the Italian or the German one is abundant, ‘peripheral', yet salient cases, such as Romanian fascism remain ess researched. The current research focuses on the nature and manifestations of Romanian fascism, by positioning it in the history of regenerative, evolutionary projects that matured in the interwar period as an alternative to what was considered the decaying system of fin-de-siècle liberalism, while xamining how they were rooted in the intellectual milieu around 1900.

The starting research hypothesis assesses fascism as a ‘coherent body of thought', a ‘form of political modernism in its own right', which presented itself as a revolutionary deology, that put forward the necessity to reshape the ‘national self' and regenerate ‘the decay' of the national body by bringing about a ‘new man' and  ‘new temporal order'. Analysing fascism from within, and considering it as a solid ideological construct, the project expects to better understand the diverse intellectual and social support it garnered, and the mass appeal that assured its political success in various contexts.

The primary focus of the research is an indepth look at what I have termed ‘the other green intellectuals', who sympathised with, and in some cases even joined, the Iron Guard (the most important fascist movement in interwar Romania) and had a genuine impact on its development. The project looks at their radical response to he temporal crisis that interwar Romania had to face, how that time horizon shaped their political views, and their ideas for an alternative extreme right-wing revolutionary ay towards modernity.

The path that the study intends to pursue is an analysis of the public stands these intellectuals took in relation to Romania's past, present and future, and how they envisaged the interplay between modernity and historicity. The kind of stand may be tracked down in some underexplored primary sources, such as the legionary and pro-legionary press and pamphlets from late 1920s to early 1940s.

The project also looks into the external intellectual influences that marked the discourse of this cohort, given the fact that, with few exceptions, most of them
were trained by, or were in close contact with academic institutions based especially in Germany, Italy, and France. By adding the analysis of their interaction in certain groups such as the ‘Axa' group, the ‘Criterion group, or the ‘Rânduiala' group, the research hopes to develop their comprehensive intellectual biographies while mapping their common views of the role of historicity in the debate focused on modernity and nation building.

Project Outline

My research investigates two ideologies of modern national citizenship which emerged in early twentieth century Bulgaria (ca. 1900-1939) as alternatives to the official ideology of liberal, individual citizenship. These framed citizenship as the contractual agreement among the main socio-economic sectors in the nation-state, on the one hand, and as negotiated cultural autonomy for the two main ethno-religious groups (Bulgarian Christians and Turkish Muslims) respectively.

The research addresses three major issues, namely:

• It explores how the prominent critiques of the official Bulgarian national project of modernity - Agrarianism and Muslim reformism - shaped national citizenship and ethno-religious relations in the post-Romantic period;
• It contextualises Agrarianism and Muslim reformism in the general framework of the European crisis of modernity, and seeks to illuminate the links between imperial past and national present, between tradition and progress which Agrarians and Muslim reformers forged in search of a viable future and empowered collective identity;
• By illuminating alternative visions of modernity in Bulgaria, it hopes to provide ground for qualified comparisons between the crises of modernity in other post-imperial, national societies in Southeastern and East-Central Europe.

By analysing the conception of property adopted by Bulgarian Agrarians and the Turkish-speaking minority in Bulgaria, and their respective efforts to change the underpinnings of modernity from liberal individual to ‘corporatist’, the project inquires whether this was a specific Bulgarian problem or whether such efforts could be interpreted as signaling of a wider crisis within European liberal modernity, in general.

Project Outline

In the period after 1918, a public debates on eugenic ideas was initiated in Bulgaria, falling in the framework of what was perceived as an interwar cultural crisis. It encompassed a large number of ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ eugenic measures with regard to healthcare, marital and sex hygiene, criminal justice, professional legislation and education. Though the most radical projects for ‘hygienisation’ of the nation were never put into practice, the Bulgarian eugenics discourse nevertheless carried a considerable rhetorical burden, and certain eugenic initiatives were partly institutionalised after the First World War.

The study aims at examining the cultural relevance of the eugenic argumentative strategies and practices in Bulgaria, in the way they were developed by adopting and emancipating Western bio-political models from the beginning of the 20th century until the 1940s. It explores the Bulgarian eugenic projects as versions of a multiform hygienic utopia, which, in turn, implied a more general project for national identity.

The research focuses on the temporal modes of a medicalised crisis of modernity and identity, transcribed as ‘degeneration’, i.e. an ‘illness’ of the ‘national organism’. It addresses the culture which the Bulgarian eugenics discourse reflected, the past historical times which it (d)evaluated, and the utopian national future which it projected. In lines with it, the analysis attempts to clarify the system of strategies and techniques for ‘naturalising’ the culture-historical continuities, applied by the eugenics discourse. It hopes to ‘map’ the symbolic register of the so-called ‘degeneration stigmata’, and question the cultural reasoning behind the selective readings of the ‘morbid’ national past, which tended to ascribe different historical periods to the decay of the ‘national organism’.

Finally, the project examines how the ‘regeneration’ of the ‘degenerated’ people was conceptualised as a target result from the synthesis of ideological visions and expert practices, i.e. of national integration theory and the instruments of state bio-politics.