SGMH Inaugural Symposium: ‘Being a Minority in Times of Catastrophe’, 25-26 June 2021
(Please be aware that all the displayed timings follow UK time)
25 June
12:00 – 12:15: Welcome remarks
12:15 – 13:30: Keynote address
Dr Mark Levene (Emeritus Fellow in History, University of Southampton) ‘Prequel to global catastrophe?: the dissolution of ‘minority’ peoples through the lens of climate crisis
13:30-13:40: Break
13:40-15:10: Session 1
Minorities and Health emergencies
Discussant: Mark Levene (University of Southampton)
Raul Carstocea (University of Leicester) Othering a Pandemic: The Scapegoating of Jews and Roma during Epidemics
Igor Vukadinovic (Institute for Balkan Studies, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade) Yugoslavian smallpox outbreak in 1972 and the health status of the Albanian national minority in Kosovo
Donatus Duesterhaus (Université de Fribourg) Lutherans between war and vaccination: crisis, catastrophe and religion in Alsace (1792-1815)
15:10-15:20: Break
15:20-16:50: Session 2
Famine and natural disasters
Discussant: Natalya Chernyshova (University of Winchester)
Immo Rebitschek (Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena) Russian Relief and ‘Tatar Misery’? The 1891/2 Famine in Kazanˈ Province
Samuel Foster (University of East Anglia) “Nothing remained but mountains of ashes”: Thessaloniki’s Jews and the Great Fire of 1917.
Olena Palko (Birkbeck, University of London) The experience of Ukraine’s Polish minority during the famine of 1932-33
26 June
12:00-13:30: Session 3:
Local strategies of mitigating crises
Discussant: Raul Carstocea (University of Leicester)
Danilo Bosnic, Djordje Milic, Vuk Mandic (University of Banja Luka) The Conflict between Law and Tradition: The Case of Irig’s Serbs during the 1795–1796 plague
Oleksii Chebotarov (University of St. Gallen) Governing Crisis, Lobbing Migration: Non-State Actors and Jewish Refugees in Habsburg Galicia in the early 1880s
Andrey Zamoisky (German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst) “There was a dead silence around there…”: the anti-Jewish violence in Soviet Belarus, 1918-1922.
13:30-13:40: Break
13:40-15:10: Session 4
Minorities and the crisis of modernisation
Discussant: Francis King (University of East Anglia)
Stephan Rindlisbacher (European University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder) Crisis as Pretext for National Segregation: The “Pasture Issue” between the Soviet Republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan, 1921-1934
Thomas Alun (Staffordshire University) Settling Nomads: Remaining a Minority in the early Soviet Union
Anca Filipovici (Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities, Cluj-Napoca) Health care at the periphery of the nation: ethnic minorities and social diseases in Romania before WWII
15:10-15:20: Break
15:20-16:50: Session 5
Othering minorities in (post)-war
Discussant: Jessica Reinisch (Birkbeck, University of London)
Amber Nickell (Purdue University) “The Underlying Cause for all the Bad Things that Happened to Us”: Ethnic Germans and Jews in German and Romanian Occupied Southern Ukraine and Transnistria, 1941-1944
Iemima Ploscariu (Dublin City University) Double Minorities in World War II Romania: Antonescu and the Neo-Protestants
Barbara Warnock, Elise Bath (The Wiener Holocaust Library) The continued marginalisation and discrimination faced by Roma and Sinti victims of Nazi persecution post-war: evidence from the International Tracing Service archives
16:50-17:10: Closing remarks
Study Group for Minority History 