|
Borderlands
The Borderlands Region
Themes and Significance
Schedule
Seminar Series
Notes
Questions, Results, Implications
Contacts
|
Project Overview
“Borderlands: Ethnicity, Identity, and Violence in the Shatter-Zone of Empires since 1848” was a large-scale interdisciplinary and international research project exploring the origins and manifestations of ethnic (and related forms of religious and social) violence in the borderlands region of East-Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe – from the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century, through the Holocaust, and beyond. The Project was centered at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University in collaboration with the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota (UMN). The Project had additional affiliations to the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish Studies (SDI) at the University of Leipzig, the University of Tübingen (UT), and the University of Marburg (UM), all in Germany; the Borderlands Foundation (BF), or Pogranicze, in Sejny, Poland; the Institute for the History of the Present, or Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent (IHTP) in Paris, France; and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC (USHMM). The Project also communicated with the multi-year seminar “Far from the Center” at the Centre Interdisciplinaire d’Etudes Centre-Européennes (CIRCE) in Paris, France; the International History Initiative (IHI) at Claremont Graduate University, in collaboration with the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs; Yad Vashem: The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority (YV) in Jerusalem, Israel; Stanford University, and Princeton University.
Over the course of the Project, “Borderlands” participants in the United States and abroad pursued the following activities:
- individual research projects by faculty and advanced graduate students
- graduate and faculty seminars on a relevant topic
- undergraduate courses on a related topic
- visiting lectures and colloquia in conjunction with the graduate seminars and undergraduate courses
- regular workshops on the themes of the Project
- the appointment of visiting fellows, both postdoctoral and senior scholars
- exchanges of students and scholars between the participating institutions
- electronic linkages of seminars, colloquia, and lectures between participating institutions
- annual update and coordination meetings of the core faculty at each institution plus participants from other institutions
- a major international concluding conference
- currently a volume drawn from the final conference and other papers presented during the Project is being prepared by Professors Omer Bartov at Brown University and Eric Weitz at the University of Minnesota
This landmark collaborative project brought together a broad array of disciplines and contributed to both graduate and undergraduate training at multiple institutions. This approach enabled the Project members, individually and collectively, to produce research findings that (a) have become central to future discussion and scholarship on ethnic violence in Europe’s eastern borderlands, including the Holocaust; (b) offer a new understanding of European history by drawing attention to its eastern regions and indicating their centrality to events in the continent over the last two centuries; (c) inform researchers, policymakers, and the public about the dynamics, complexities, potentials, and perils of interethnic relations in other parts of the world; and (d) propose new methodological tools to investigate communal, state, and interstate relations in the modern era. Finally, the Project has created a new network of scholars from many countries and disciplines who are preoccupied with research and writing on the topic of borderlands both as a specific region and as a research paradigm.
|
