The workshop “Works in Transition” brings together advanced graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and senior scholars working on modern Eastern, Central, and Southeastern Europe and based in Budapest, Vienna, and New York. It combines research paper presentations with a participatory reflection on what it means to be a historian today: how we practice history in the archive, at the writing desk, and on the job market. Conceived as a space for horizontal discussion, the workshop examines the existential, affective, epistemic, and political dimensions of our work, transforming individual “work-in-progress” into a collective reflection on our shared, vulnerable experience of “work-in-transition”—whether between scholarly paradigms, continents, jobs, or between academia and other worlds of learning. The workshop responds to a widely felt need—especially among younger colleagues—for a forum in which to think together about archival research, writing, and narrative-making in a rapidly changing institutional and technological landscape. It forms part of a broader effort to foster dialogue among scholars at different career stages, based in Europe and the United States, about the shared practice of producing history today.

Program:

June 3: Points of Entry

14:00-14:45 Introductions, setting the agenda 

Moderator: Charis Maranzidou, Karolina Partyga, Lucija Balikić

15:00-15:45 Archival epistemologies: Ioana Macrea-Toma 

15:45-16:00 Coffee Break 

16:00-18:00

A collective discussion during which each participant will be invited to share a source, or a story about a source. Instead of individual presentations, the sources which we will bring will be points to navigate a general discussion about how our engagement with sources changes over time – historical, as well as personal; about verbalizing the practices and intuitions that guide our readings; about the playful and creative potential of our work.

Moderators: Ioana Macrea-Toma and Gábor Egry

June 4: Transitions and Exits

9:30-12:00    Projects-in-transition: a workshop based on four written works submitted by select participants and distributed to the whole group before the event. This session will focus on the relationship between research and frameworks of its presentations.

The submissions will only include introductions to dissertations or draft book manuscripts. Rather than discussing each introduction separately, we will focus on the role that introductions play in the production and dissemination of knowledge, in our “branding” as scholars, and in guiding diverse readers into the nitty-gritty world of Eastern, Central, and Southeastern histories. While those who submit will say a few words of context at the beginning, the workshop will not be structured as an interaction between presenters, commentators, and audiences, but, instead, will be a collective forum for asking broader questions based on the submitted work.

Moderator(s): Tetiana Zemliakova, Małgorzata Mazurek

Pre-circulated papers of selected workshop participants 

10:45-11:00 Coffee break 

12:00-13:00 Lunch break

13:00-14:15 Field in transition?: a collective discussion of what “Eastern European” history means today. We will talk about the trajectories of area studies, of the theory of history, and of research mobility. We will also address the questions that changing technologies pose for both research and teaching, from AI to digitization of sources.

Moderator: Cody Inglis  

14:15-14:30    Coffee break

14:30-16:00    Exiting the PhD, entering the academic market: during this session, we will discuss both the specificity of the conditions of academic work in Europe and the US, as well as explore the “products” of our labor – writing book proposals, selecting sections of bigger research projects for articles, creating academic networks, and navigating the precarity of contemporary academia.

Moderator: Karolina Partyga, Daniela Muntean

Sponsors: Institute for Advanced Study at CEU; CEU Democracy Institute, ‘Democracy in History’ Working Group; Blinken OSA Archivum; Department of History, Columbia University