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New Podcast Announcement
Jonathan Conlin invites Samuel Foster to explain the rationale behind his new module on “Europe in the Era of the Great War” and report on how students have engaged with imagology and uncomfortable analogies with their own times. This podcast is part of The Lausanne Project, which provides a forum for scholars to share research…
2025 Best First Book Proposal Prize: Winner announced
[Winner] Dr Andrea Gritti (Center for Turkish, Ottoman, Balkan and Central Asian Studies (CETOBaC), EHESS, Paris) The Epitome of All That is Modern: The Rise and Fall of Jewish Trading Houses in the Late Ottoman Balkans Andrea Gritti’s proposal represents a significant contribution to both the study of European Jewish history and the economic development…
CfP: Life under the Red Banner: Minorities in Socialist Europe, 11-12 September 2025, University of Basel, Switzerland
The Study Group for Minority History is pleased to invite interested scholars to submit their abstracts for the international conference “Life under the Red Banner: Minorities in Socialist Europe”, to be held on 11-12 September 2025 at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Deadline for applications is 1 April 2025. About the conference Socialist regimes have…
Prize for Best First Book Proposal: deadline extended
The Deadline for the Study Group’s Prize for Best First Book Proposal has been extended to 31 January. The Prize for Best First Book Proposal in Minority History was launched by the BASEES Study Group for Minority History (SGMH) in September 2022 to recognise scholarly excellence among early career academics seeking to publish their original research with a major…
Publication Announcement: ‘Minorities at War (Part 2): Minority Agency in Times of Conflict’
The SGMH’s latest publication, ‘Minorities at War (Part 1): State Policies in Times of Conflict’, has now been published as a special issue of the Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe (JEMIE), Vol. 23 No. 3 (2024). Thank you to all of our contributing authors for their patience over the last three years. Alongside a thematic…
Publication Announcement: ‘Minorities at War (Part 1): State Policies in Times of Conflict’
The SGMH’s latest publication, ‘Minorities at War (Part 1): State Policies in Times of Conflict’, has now been published as a special issue of the Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe (JEMIE), Vol. 23 No. 2 (2024). Thank you to all of our contributing authors for their patience over the last three years. Alongside a thematic…
Publication Announcement: ‘Being a Minority in Times of Crisis’
The SGMH’s latest publication, ‘Being a Minority in Times of Crisis’, has now been published as a special issue of the Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas (‘East European History’), Vol.71, No.3 (December 2023). Thank you to all of our contributing authors for their patience over the last three years. Alongside a thematic introduction co-authored by Olena Palko and Samuel Foster, the…
Muslims in Ukraine. Old History – New Challenges
Workshop Report Organizers: Olena Palko (Basel), Mykhaylo Yakubovych (Freiburg) Sponsored by: URIS Ukrainian Research in Switzerland, BASEES Study Group for Minority History (SGMH), University of Basel, 14th of September 2023 Report by Micha Steiner The URIS-Workshop: “Muslims in Ukraine. Old History – New Challenges” took place on the 14th of September 2023 at the University…
New SGMH Publication: Ukraine’s Many Faces Land, People, and Culture Revisited
We are happy to announce the publication of our new edited volume on Ukraine, entitled “Ukraine’s Many Faces Land, People, and Culture Revisited”. The book is the first title in the new book series of the University of New Europe, and can be downloaded for free from the publisher’s website. Print version is forthcoming at the end of July.
Conference Report: Minorities at War from Napoleon to Putin, 11-12 May 2023, New Europe College, Bucharest, Romania
Conference Report Organizers: Costantin Ardeleanu, Raul Cârstocea, Samuel Foster, Olena Palko Report by: Julia Elena Grieder, SGMH Subscription Officer; Department of History, University of Basel The third biennial symposium of the BASEES Study Group for Minority History (SGMH) took place on 11.-12. May 2023 in the New Europe College, Bucharest. It was supported by the…
2023 Best First Book Proposal Prize: Winner announced
[Winner] Vita Zalar (Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana): The Political Economy of Antigypsyism: Habsburg and Post-Habsburg Perspectives Vita Zalar’s forthcoming monograph, The Political Economy of Antigypsyism: Habsburg and Post-Habsburg Perspectives, breaks new ground by offering a historical materialist reading of the imperial and post-imperial forms of structural racism against…
CFP: The war in Ukraine and its impact on ethno-religious minorities in the region
2023-01-30 Russia’s war against Ukraine, which began in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas, and escalated into a full-scale attack in February 2022, was a challenge to the entire system of international relations that has developed since the end of World War II. Researchers and politicians are analyzing the…
New Publication Alert
Olena Palko (2022) Between Moscow, Warsaw and the Holy See: The Case of Father Andrzej Fedukowicz Amidst the Early Soviet Anti-Catholic Campaign, Revolutionary Russia. https://doi.org/10.1080/09546545.2022.2136353 This article offers a micro-history of Soviet anti-religious actions during the mid-1920s through a reconstruction of the investigation of Father Andrzej Fedukowicz and his forced collaboration with the Soviet secret…
Episode 33. Ronald G. Suny: Armenia, Soviet Studies and the Future of Minority History
In our final episode (for now), we talk to Ronald Grigor Suny, the William H. Sewell Junior. Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan and Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago. Besides a long-standing reputation for having been an early exponent…
Episode 32. Petre Matei: Localizing the history of the ‘forgotten victims’: The Roma in Romania
In this week’s episode, Petre Matei (Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania) talks to Raul Cârstocea (Maynooth University) about the history of the Roma in Romania, from the late 19th century to the present. Petre Matei argues for a more nuanced history of the Roma, questioning dominant narratives of…
SGMH First Book Proposal Prize
THE BASEES STUDY GROUP FOR MINORITY HISTORY (SGMH) PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST BOOK PROPOSAL The Prize for Best First Book Proposal in Minority History will be launched by the BASEES Study Group for Minority History (SGMH) in September 2022 to recognise scholarly excellence among early career academics seeking to publish their original research with a…
Episode 31. Timothy Blauvelt & Francis King: Clientelism and Nationality in Early Soviet Abkhazia
In this podcast, Timothy Blauvelt of Ilia State University, Tbilisi, Georgia, in conversation with Francis King of the University of East Anglia’s East Centre, considers the early years of Soviet Abkhazia and its well-connected leader, Nestor Lakoba. The discussion ranges over Lakoba’s role in the revolution, his career as the indispensable Bolshevik figure in Soviet…
Episode 30. Jakub Beneš: The Rural-Urban Divide in East-Central Europe
Jakub Beneš, Associate Professor in Central European History at UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, joins us to discuss the role of peasant communities and anti-urban sentiment in the socio-political landscape of Austria-Hungary, its successor states and the independent Balkans. Challenging earlier characterisations of the peasantry as inherently reactionary, Jakub considers how the…
Episode 29. Martin-Oleksandr Kysly & Austin Charron: Crimean Tatars and the contested status of Crimea
Episode 29. Martin-Oleksandr Kysly & Austin Charron: Crimean Tatars and the contested status of Crimea In this episode, Austin Charron (University of Wisconsin-Madison, http://www.austincharron.com/) and Oleksandr-Martin Kysly (National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy) discuss the experiences of the Crimean Tatars before the Second World War and their forced deportation to Central Asia and Siberia in 1944.…
Episode 28. Natalia Aleksiun: Poland’s Jews in the 20th century
In this episode, Natalia Aleksiun, Harry Rich Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Florida, discusses the social dynamics of interethnic relations in interwar Poland, particularly in relation to the Holocaust. One of the characteristics discussed is the double marginalisation of Jewish women, which made them more susceptible to discrimination regarding education, professional choices…
Episode 27. Catherine Wanner & Julia Buyskykh: Religious Minorities in Ukraine and Poland
Episode 27. Catherine Wanner & Julia Buyskykh: Religious Minorities in Ukraine and Poland In this episode, Catherine Wanner, Professor of History, Anthropology and Religious Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, and Julia Buyskykh, Research Fellow at the Institute of History of Ukraine (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine) and co-founder of the Centre for Applied…
Episode 26. Antony Polonsky: From Apartheid South Africa to Jewish History in Poland
In this episode, Antony Polonsky, Emeritus Professor of Holocaust History at Brandeis University talks to Jan Rybak, Early Career Fellow at the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism. For several decades, Professor Polonsky has been at the forefront of Polish Jewish historiography. Having grown up in Apartheid South Africa, he came to Poland to…
Episode 25. Roundtable: Contested Minorities in the ‘New Europe’
Roundtable participants: Anca Filipovici (Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities, in Cluj, Romania), Christopher Wendt (European University Institute in Florence), Giuseppe Motta (Sapienza University of Rome) and Petru Negură (IOS). Among the many challenges facing the new, or enlarged, nation-states that arouse on the territories of the former empires of Central, Eastern and Southeastern…
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