Regimes of Historicity Project, CAS Sofia

[mariya...@gmail.com]

CENTRE FOR ADVANCED STUDY SOFIA

2009/2010 FELLOWSHIP PROGRAMME

under the research project

REGIMES OF HISTORICITY AND DISCOURSES OF MODERNITY AND IDENTITY,
1900-1945, IN EAST-CENTRAL, SOUTHEASTERN AND NORTHERN EUROPE

October 2008 – June 2010

Supported by the Volkswagen Foundation, Germany, the Fritz Thyssen
Foundation, Germany and the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation,
Sweden.

The Centre for Advanced Study Sofia (Bulgaria) announces a Call for
Applications for participation in the international project Regimes of
Historicity and Discourses of Modernity and Identity, 1900-1945, in
East-Central, Southeastern and Northern Europe (see Brief Description
below).

General conditions

CAS will award five research fellowships to scholars working in the
area of the social sciences and humanities for a period of 9 months (1
October 2009 – 30 June 2010). The programme envisages individual
research and participation in two working sessions and one extended
colloquium. Non-Bulgarian Fellows can spend in-residence research
periods of varying length in Sofia (negotiable in each individual
case).

The selected Fellows will receive a monthly fellowship of 750 Euro
(including travel allowance and research expenses). The Centre for
Advanced Study Sofia provides the academic, organisational and
administrative support for the research. All technical and library
facilities of the Centre are available to the Fellows.

Deadline for applications: 20 April 2009

Eligibility

• Scholars working in the social sciences and/or the humanities from
any country, holders of a doctoral degree or at the final stage of
fulfilling the requirements for such a degree;
• Applicants may not be older than 45 years of age at the start of the
fellowship period;
• The applicants’ proposals should fall into the thematic area of the
project. Please see the Full Research Description enclosed (PDF).

Working language and language skill requirements

The Fellows will work in an international research team, where all
discussions, workshops and other events will be in English, as should
be the final research paper to be submitted for publication. Only
applicants fluent in English (oral and written) will be considered and
a certificate or another proof of language proficiency is highly
recommended.

The application package must be submitted in English by e-mail to the
contact person indicated below and must include:

1. Research proposal (no more than 1500 – 1800 words) including: • a
short description of the planned research, • methodology, •
contribution to the overall research aims of the Regimes of
Historicity project, • general framework of interpretation; • selected
bibliography (10-15 works) on the topic.

2. Brief (1 page max.) scientific self-evaluation of the applicant
(demonstrating the applicant's potential to go significantly beyond
the state of the art, a presentation of the content of the scholarly
contributions of the applicant to his/her own research field; the
recognition and diffusion that these contributions have received:
publications, citations or appropriate equivalents, students/
internatio nal prizes and awards, institution- building, other);

3. CV and list of publications;

4. Optional: a relevant text (chapter of a dissertation, publication,
etc.) of up to 25 pages;

5. Names and contact details of 2 referees.

Selection procedure

The selection will be carried out by the CAS Academic Advisory
Council, an international body composed of prominent scholars in the
social sciences and the humanities. The final results will be
announced in May, 2009 via email to the applicants and on the Centre’s
website: www.cas.bg.

Criteria governing the selection

• innovative insights • interdisciplinary approach • comparative
approach • relation to the overall thematic framework of the project •
important publications on the topic or in a related field.

Detailed information about the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia and the
project Regimes of Historicity and Discourses of Modernity and
Identity, 1900-1945, in East-Central, Southeastern and Northern Europe
is available at www.cas.bg.

Please, email your application package not later than 20th April 2009
to:

Mr Dimiter Dimov
Project Coordinator
e-mail: di...@cas.bg
Centre for Advanced Study Sofia
70 Neofit Rilski Str.
Sofia 1000, Bulgaria
tel.: + 359 2 9803704 / fax: + 359 2 9803662

Regimes of Historicity and Discourses of Modernity and Identity,
1900-1945, in East-Central, Southeastern and Northern Europe

BRIEF INTRODUCTION

For the full research description, please see the attached file, or
the announcement on the Centre’s homepage at www.cas.bg.

The Regimes of Historicity project focuses on the comparative analysis
of the various ideological traditions thematising the connection
between modernity and historicity – a connection lying at the core of
modern identity-narratives in the post-romantic era (1900-1945) - in
three “small-state” regions: East-Central, Southeastern, and Northern
Europe. The choice of ideologies as the vantage point of our research
involves visions of past and future, of continuity and discontinuity
in a wide spectrum of twentieth-century social and political thinking
about modernity and identity. Above all, we plan to concentrate on the
ways these traditions have been shaped and interpreted by the
different branches of the humanities and the newly formed social
sciences. This will make it possible to reconsider the usual metaphors
rooted in temporal dimensions that are used for non-core Western
cultures, such as asynchrony, backwardness, catching-up, whose moral
and
normative implications have been at the core of modernist and anti-
modernist discourses ever since the dawn of the twentieth century. The
process of cultural appropriation and mediation will be a central axis
of investigation pointing to the complex interplay of local traditions
and “imported” ideological packages. Extending two regional
comparative paradigms – the long-standing Südostforschung and the more
recent Nordic Spaces research – the project undertakes a comparison
across historical regions testing for regional peculiarities and
common European phenomena. This is also seen as opening up the
possibility for formulating heuristic regional typologies, looking at
the specific mechanisms of framing modernity in Southeastern, Central
and Northern Europe.

As it is known, the entire discussion of regional differences (e.g.
between East, West, North, Centre, Southeast, etc.) has been typically
framed in terms of temporality – in notions such as backwardness,
overtaking, progress and so on. Our reconstruction of the patterns of
historicity - of the temporal visions historical actors held of their
own contexts – seeks to challenge the centre-periphery backwardness
narrative and render a more balanced picture of historical difference.
We also see our research as offering an alternative to post-colonial
narratives, which focus on the fundamental difference of the European
core and the other, in that in our case the whole framework of
otherness is relativised and fine-tuned. Comparing the various
peripheries to each other could give us a certain insight into the
issue of legacies – into the way tradition is framed in a Protestant,
Orthodox or Muslim context; or in the long-term impact of competing
post-imperial and nation-state models of framing the past. We thus
hope to develop a relativised but not necessarily relativist vision of
political modernity capable to substantiate the vision of multiple
modernities and thus open up the discussion of how imported models and
local traditions are related to each other.

The two-year research agenda will be accomplished via four closely
interrelated components that allow for the deeper and more
comprehensive understanding of the theoretical problems in focus:
Senior Fellowship Programme, Junior Fellowship Programme, Extended
Colloquia and Guest-Scholar Programme. The Regimes of Historicity
Fellows will work on their individual case studies and come together
for joint working sessions, colloquia and conferences to discuss each
others’ findings in the multidisciplinary and international
environment provided by the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia. The core
group of 10 junior scholars who will be selected via an open Call for
Applications will be supervised by the project convenor Prof. Dr Diana
Mishkova and the senior Fellows – researchers with extensive
experience in the thematic field.