EVENT
EVENT
When: Thursday, 26 May 2022 | 18:00- 20:00
Where: ACG Events Hall, The American College of Greece
Organized by:
The American College of Greece, The Institute for Hellenic Culture and the Liberal Arts and Contemporary European History Journal
There seems to be no end to the controversies over the European past. From the polemics surrounding the legacies of Nazism and the Holocaust to the ongoing struggle over Europe’s colonial history, and the impact of the end of the Cold War on international relations, European historians today are faced with a proliferation of civic and political debates that draw on the “lessons” of history.
But how should European historians respond to these public invocations of history? To what extent do we have a responsibility to contribute to debate? How should we react to the manipulation or politicization of our work? By bringing together historians of different countries, regions and subfields within European history, our aim is to start a conversation about the place of the historian in today’s fractured political landscape.
Welcome address
Prof. Loren Samons, Founding Executive Director of the Institute for Hellenic Culture and the Liberal Arts (IHCLA)
Speakers
Dr. Giorgos Antoniou (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
Prof. Pieter Lagrou (Université Libre of Bruxelles)
Dr. David Motadel (London School of Economics)
Prof. Jelena Subotic (Georgia State University)
Prof. Sergey Radchenko (John Hopkins)
Chair
Dr. Emile Chabal (University of Edinburgh)
This public event is free and open to all but pre-registration is required.
David Motadel is Associate Professor of International History at the LSE.
A graduate of Cambridge, where he was a Gates Scholar, he has held visiting positions at Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Sciences Po, and the Sorbonne. He is the author of Islam and Nazi Germany’s War (Harvard University Press, 2014), which was awarded the Fraenkel Prize, and the editor of Islam and the European Empires (Oxford University Press, 2014). He is currently writing a global history of Europe’s empires in the Second World War for Penguin Press. His articles have been published in numerous academic journals, including Past & Present, The American Historical Review, and the Annales. He also regularly writes on history and current affairs for newspapers and magazines. His reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement, among others. In 2018, he received the Philip Leverhulme Prize for History.
Jelena Subotić is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Georgia State University.
Her most recent book, Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism( Cornell University Press, 2019, Serbian translation 2021) has won the 2020 Joseph Rothschild Prize in Nationalism and Ethnic Studies, the 2020 American Political Science Association European Politics and Society Book Prize, the 2020 Robert L. Jervis and Paul W. Schroeder Prize for the Best Book in International History and Politics (American Political Science Association) and Honorable mention, 2020 Barbara Heldt Prize for Best Book by a woman in any area of Slavic/East European/Eurasian Studies. Her first book, Hijacked Justice: Dealing with the Past in the Balkans (Cornell University Press, 2009) has been translated and published in Serbia in 2010. She is also the author of more than 30 scholarly articles on, among other topics, memory politics, transitional justice, and politics of the Balkans.
Pieter Lagrou teaches contemporary history at the Université Libre de Bruxelles.
Among his most recent publications are Defeating Impunity. Attemps at International Justice in Europe since 1914. with Ornella Rovetta (Berghahn, War and Genocide series, New York/Oxford, 2022) and Europe’s Postwar Periods: 1989, 1945, 1918: Writing History Backwards with Martin Conway and Henry Rousso (Bloomsbury, London, December 2018, 236 p.)
Georgios Antoniou holds the Chair of Jewish Studies since 2015 and since 2019 he has become a faculty member in the Department of History and Archaeology. In 2019 he was awarded the Baron Velge Prize for research and teaching about World War Two and he held, as a visiting scholar, the International Chair for the Second World War in Brussels (ULB). He is a member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance since 2018 (Education). In 2018 his co-edited volume (with Dirk Moses) on the Holocaust in Greece was published from Cambridge University Press. He is the national leader on two Horizon2020 projects.
Sergey Radchenko is the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
He has written extensively on the Cold War, nuclear history, and on Russian and Chinese foreign and security policies. He has served as a Global Fellow and a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre and as the Zi Jiang Distinguished Professor at East China Normal University (Shanghai). Professor Radchenko’s books include Two Suns in the Heavens: the Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy (Wilson Center Press & Stanford UP, 2009) and Unwanted Visionaries: the Soviet Failure in Asia (Oxford UP, 2014).