Research Teams
Team 1: Institutions, Networks and Communities
Team leader: Professor Ilaria Porciani, Università di Bologna
This team will investigate the role of social actors in constructing national histories, focusing in particular on their institutions, networks and communities. It will seek to explain the relationship between the professionalisation of the historical discipline and the emergence of national histories during the last two centuries. By comparing a wide number of cases drawn from diverse parts of Europe, contributors from various countries will answer the following questions: (1) how did the institutionalisation and professionalisation of history shape different national historiographies? (2) What has been the role of specific networks in the process of nation-building? (3) What has been the role of specific networks of sociability and communication? (4) What impact has politics had on the institutionalisation of the discipline? (5) When, where and why did women become professional historians? The team will also establish a comprehensive data base of the institutions of national histories.
Team 2: Narrating National Histories
Team leader: Professor Chris Lorenz, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
National ‘master narratives’ always stand in close relationship with narratives, such as those based on gender, ethnicity, class and/or religion. In what ways have such social cleavages mattered to national history writing? This team will investigate the links and interdependencies between histories written from a national perspective and those written from a perspective of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and religion. It will focus on the following five areas: (1) Origins/ foundational myths of national histories, (2) Who are the main actors/ heroes in national narratives? (3) How have national histories been constructed as unique/ special? What Sonderweg or special missions have been formulated? (4) Which historical periods have been described as the times of national decline and renewal? What events/ periods have been regarded as catastrophes/ major ruptures? (5) Which internal ‘non-spacial Others’ have been included and/or excluded from national master narratives?
Team 3: National Histories and its Interrelation with Regional, European and World Histories
Team leaders: Dr. Matthias Middell, Universität Leipzig, and Professor Lluis Roura y Aulinas, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
The very concept of national historiography could be better explained by contrasting it with other spatial forms of historical writing, such as regional, European and world histories. This team will look at the relationship between national history on the one hand and the spatial historical representations (the regional, European and global ones) on the other. It focuses on hierarchies of spatial dimensions and investigates their interrelationship. How open or closed have national spaces been in historical writing with regard to sub-national or supra-national spaces? In pursuing this theme, the following research questions will be tackled: (1) what has been the precise relationship between national and regional/local history? (2) What has been the relationship between national and European history? (3) What has been the relationship between national and world history?
Team 4: Overlapping National Histories
Team leaders: Dr. Frank Hadler, GWZO Leipzig and Professor Tibor Frank, ELTE Budapest
This team will explore the different ways in which national histories in Europe have been politicized and subjected to nationalist interpretations. In multinational states and empires, a common past and a shared territory have had a double-effect on history writing: it could unite histories but it could also increase attempts to assert differences and construct borders. The team will explore how changing border lines have created overlapping and competing perspectives on national histories. It will take up the subject in three directions: (1) territorial overlaps and traumatic interdependencies in different national histories; (2) the impact of territorial changes on the construction of national histories; (3) the construction of ’other’ nations as reflected in the construction of one’s ’own’ nation.
