Notes

Watson Institute:
The annual bimonthly seminar at the Watson Institute included a core group of participants consisting of Project Leader Omer Bartov, Senior Visiting Fellow Timothy Snyder (2003-04), and Postdoctoral Fellow Patrice Dabrowski (2003-05). The seminar invited visiting speakers from other institutions throughout the year. It included researchers working at the WI, faculty from Brown University and other nearby institutions, and graduate students from the relevant departments in the social sciences and the humanities, as well as a select group of undergraduates. The seminar was devoted to discussions of pre-circulated papers. The workshops at the end of the year were devoted to a summing up of the themes discussed and to an attempt to articulate them into a coherent statement. The workshops included participants in the seminar and other invited speakers. The proceedings of these workshops were not published separately but a selection will be included in the final volume that will result from the Project.

University of Minnesota:
Apart from running graduate seminars and hosting workshops and conferences, UMN also invited visitors from other institutions involved in “Borderlands.” Visitors presented in the seminar and workshops, and gave a public lecture. UMN also provided graduate students with a research stipend. These students took part in the seminar, workshops, and conferences related to “Borderlands.”
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
The USHMM helped fund the participation of some of its visiting scholars in workshops held at the Watson Institute.

International History Initiative (IHI):
This project, directed by Elazar Barkan, formerly of Claremont Graduate University and now of Columbia University, in collaboration with the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, launched one of its subgroup initiatives on “The Burden of History: World War II Memory and Polish-Jewish Reconciliation.” The workshop, held at the SDI, Leipzig, on April 3-5, 2003, in which Omer Bartov participated, discussed the role of history in political reconciliation and the potential impact of historians on public debates about the past. There is an obvious link between this initiative and the “Borderlands” Project and thus there was a fair amount of intellectual collaboration between the Project and the IHI.

“Far from the Center”:
The Central European Research Group at the University of Paris IV, the Sorbonne, Paris, launched a series of seminars under the general title of “Far from the Center: Myths of the Borderlands, Quest for Identity, and the Poetic Peripheral in the Central European Culture of 1880-1930.” Led by Délphine Bechtel (German Studies) and Xavier Galmiche (Slavic Studies), this series held three conferences: “The Voyage into the Borderlands” (February 2002); “The Myth of the Borderlands” (January 2003); “Destruction and Nostalgia: The Peripheral Esthetics of the Borderlands” (March 2004), in which Omer Bartov also participated. These international gatherings of scholars were focused on literature, art, and history, and therefore complemented the “Borderlands” Project in a number of important ways.

Concluding Conference:
The concluding conference gathered a large number of scholars, some of whom had already been involved in previous activities of the Project, and others who were new to it.  The conference combined roundtables, paper presentations, and workshop formats. Some of the papers presented, along with a selection of papers presented at previous workshops and seminars, and possibly other commissioned contributions, will serve as the basis for the volume that will result from the Project, edited by Omer Bartov and Eric Weitz.

Specific goals:
The main goal of the Project and of the forthcoming edited volume is not only to expand our knowledge and understanding of the Borderlands areas of eastern Europe in the last two centuries, but also to impact contemporary politics by setting the historical and analytical background to many of the problems still plaguing these lands, as well as many other borderland and ethnically-mixed areas in the world. With this goal in mind, the editors of the volume will strive to bring it out not only in English but also in such languages as French, German, Polish, and Hebrew, in cooperation with the Project’s affiliated institutions.

Scope of meetings:
The Project as a whole served as the focus for a major network of scholars, numbering several dozens. While some scholars participated in more than one event, the Watson Institute alone hosted two years of annual bimonthly seminars and three workshops with an average of 15 participants in each. Together with workshops held at the University of Minnesota, the IHTP in Paris, the Dubnow Institute and the University of Tübingen in Germany, and the final conference in Marburg, also in Germany, one can say that the project gathered the majority of both senior and younger scholars working on the issue of Europe’s Eastern Borderlands in the United States, Europe, and Israel.

Interdisciplinarity:
The Project gathered scholars from a variety of disciplines, including history (European, Middle Eastern, Russian, modern and early modern), political science, sociology, anthropology, and literature.

Related activities:
These included such events as the annual conference “Imperial Jews, Diasporic Constructions, and Other Means of Non-Territorial Self Organization – The Russian, Habsburg, and Ottoman Legacies,” held at the SDI in 2004; the on-going series of meetings of the research group on “The Violence of War” at the IHTP; and the cultural events organized by the Borderland Foundation (Pogranicze) at Sejny, Poland.