CfP: From Empires to Nation-States: Continuities, Transformations and Entanglements in World History

Call for papers, deadline 15 December 2023

ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius “Beyond Borders” Fellows Working Group

Conveners:

Burak Sayım, Ph.D., burak.sayim@nyu.edu

Zora Piskačová, M.A., zora.piskacova@unc.edu

The global demise of empire as hegemonic polity and the subsequent emergence of nation-states draw ever-increasing scholarly attention. While older historiography portrayed this process as an uncompromising triumph of the nation over antiquated forms of statecraft, recent scholarship focusing on the afterlife of imperial structures demonstrates that these transitions were complex processes marked by both ruptures and continuities. Our working group seeks to bring together young scholars working on different aspects of these transformations across different (post-)imperial contexts and begin developing a topology of transition.

Facilitating a conversation across different regions and timeframes, we aim to a) raise questions about the interconnected nature of both imperial decline and nation-state formation and b) develop a broader topology of post-imperial transitions.

Our working group has been meeting regularly for the last year, comprising of fellows from the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius “Beyond Borders” program. We now intend to expand our working group with a limited number of Ph.D. candidates and early career scholars outside of the fellowship program. We seek to create a casual online forum in which an interdisciplinary cohort of scholars will be able to receive feedback from their peers on pre-circulated work-progress such as dissertation chapters and article manuscripts.

The sessions are held online on Tuesday at 17:00 CET, the last week of every other month between January 2024 and December 2024. The workshop will be conducted in English. We will discuss up to two papers that are pre-circulated one week before the meeting. Presenters are asked to give a at most 5-minute overview, contextualizing their paper rather than re-telling its contents. The rest of the time is spent discussing comments and answering questions from other participants.

If you would like to be considered to join From Empires to Nation-States send your CV and an abstract of your project to the email addresses listed above by December 15, 2023.

For any questions or concerns, do not hesitate to contact us. We look forward to your submissions!

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