Summer Institute, European Humanities University, Vilnius
Professors Iryna Ramanava (EHU) and Jeremy Adelman (Cambridge/Princeton)
6-12 July, 2025
⋆｡˚☀️ From 6-12 July, 2025, the European Humanities University will host a Summer Institute for advanced undergraduate, Masters’, and early PhD students to spend one week learning and discussing cutting-edge topics and debates in global and transnational history in the age of resurgent nationalism. The goal of the Institute is to familiarize students with concepts, methods, and historiographies that inform their future research ideas. The Institute will combine lectures, seminar discussions, and activities related to the regional history after 1815.
In recent times, politicians, intellectuals, and media figures have rewired the master narratives of European history to suit the prominence of the nation and its enemies as instruments of their claim to occupy prominence on political map. They take advantage of the fact that the bulk of the existing scholarly historical literature is written from a national perspective. The historiography still influences the formation and change of national identities.
National oriented historiography in many cases leads to the exclusion of Eastern European countries from European context, it is assigned to a post-Soviet space or a Russian sphere of dominance. The transnational paradigm or approaches make it possible to overcome these limitations and place regional histories of states, borders, and peoples in wider, global settings.
This new turn in our historiography concentrates on relations between cultures, societies and deliberately transcends the boundaries of one culture or country. It focuses on agents of cultural exchange and is thus oriented toward agency. One of the ways of doing transnational history is the “cultural transfer”. The cultural transfer model relies on knowledge of the transmitting and receiving cultures. It based not on the studying of influences but on the processes of accommodation and utilization, investigating the ways in which local cultures use and transform cultural goods. Transfer history does not apply only to “high culture”, but to cultural history in the brood anthropological sense. There are other modes that create and cross borders, from entanglement, exchanges, and diffusions; they include forces beyond the cultural realms, like economic exchanges, the spread of institutional practices of mass societies and violent regimes – and social and normative responses to them.
The objective of this Institute is to familiarize participants with current debates about the place of nations and regions in global history. Case studies, lectures, and readings will be selected from the period since 1815 up to the present.
Topics will include:
✦What is global and transnational history in 2025?
✦Comparisons or connections?
✦How to do micro-global history?
✦Is there a global history of nations and nationalisms?
✦The limits and possibilities of combining regional and international scales
✦Migrations and Borders
✦Violence
✦Democracy and Transnational Movements
A total of 15 students will be selected to participate.
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Transportation (up to 250 euros) and all lodging costs for the duration of the Institute will be covered. To qualify, applicants must be enrolled as full-time students for the academic year 2025-26.
Undergraduates must be entering their final year of studies. Interested applicants should submit a curriculum vitae, a letter of introduction and statement of interest (maximum two pages), and email addresses for two referees able to submit letters of recommendation.
✍ Applications should be sent to Center for Belarus and Regional Studies EHU
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