City and Memory - Instytut Historii im. Tadeusza Manteuffla PAN - Instytut Historii PAN | Instytut Historii im. Tadeusza Manteuffla PAN

About

International conference “City and Memory”: Call for Papers

A deeper historic consciousness of the masses has developed since the time of Enlightenment, which found its expression in thriving historical science and in the creation of memory cultures. Memory is today one of the leading research categories in humanities. It helps to analyse how normative and formative forms of the past were constructed.

An act of remembrance could take the form of, e.g. the (re)construction of a bygone past in historical works, collecting and exhibiting artefacts, building a monument or edifice, or a municipal commemoration ceremony. The role of the media of remembrance could be played, among others, by cultural goods which then served as tools for mediating the memory of the past, or as the inspiration for creating new narratives. The multiculturalism of cities in Central and Eastern Europe meant that building a dominant culture of memory and the related process of forgetting stimulated the emergence of other, alternative cultures of memory, as well as individual and group “counter-memory” basing on this ethnic, religious and cultural variety.

The culture of memory, defined as “all sorts of texts, images and photos, paintings, monuments, constructions, ceremonies, rituals along with symbolic and mythic forms of expression […]” (Christoph Cornelißen), filled and fills to a large extent the public sphere. The co-founders of this culture: rulers, politicians, officials, architects, artists, writers, historians, conservationists, along with its users, drew from the treasury of the past, described history, commemorated, cultivated traditions and restructured urban space. By doing this, they were constantly making adaptations, reinterpreting, compiling, practicing bricolage and pastiche, looking for analogies and adapting to old traditions that were being newly discovered. These practices of memory were linked by an orientation towards the needs of the present and future of a given group. They were also part of what we now call “identity politics”, or a political strategy to construct or strengthen group togetherness with the help of the manipulation of beliefs related to a sense of common identity.

The aim of the conference is to examine different manifestations of the existence and development of memory cultures in the context of towns and cities of Central and East-Central Europe since the end of the eighteenth century. We invite general historians, art and architecture historians, and cultural researchers to submit proposals for papers on the following issues:

constructing, practicing and imposing memory cultures in towns and cities, as well as the social agency of different types of media of remembrance (memorial plaques, museums and exhibitions, monuments, historical works, etc.);
the influence of the memory cultures on urban local, national, religious, ethnic, gender, etc. identities, and on the creation of new cultural codes;
creating a popular idea of heritage and the relations between the phenomena of place identity and group identity;
memory cultures and the historically sensitive identities as a weapon in the political struggle for the legitimacy of power and spatial hegemony, for the right to exist of various communities and for the creation of separate spatial and social structures, often inaccessible from the outside (ghettoization, gentrification);
and finally, the question of whether towns and cities created their own cultures of memory independent of states (through, e.g., city museums, monuments and plaques, the contents of exhibitions, book collections, etc.).

The conference will take place on 27‒29 October 2021 online via the program Zoom. The conference languages will be English and Polish. Applications should be submitted by 1 May 2021, and guests should register by 1 October 2021 through the conference website: ihpanstary.aionline.dev/en/city-and-memory (the tab “Submissions”). Admission decisions will be announced by 1 June 2021. Afterwards, the conference referees will be kindly asked to submit full texts written in English. The texts will make up a book, which will be a new reflection on the issue of towns/cities and memory in the region in question. The manuscript will be sent to one of the leading Anglo-Saxon scholarly publishers.

Conference languages:
English and Polish

Conference organisers:
Manteuffel Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences
Gdynia City Museum

Organisation committee:
Prof. Jacek Friedrich
Dr. Aleksander Łupienko

Conference committee:
Prof. Maciej Janowski
Prof. Rafał Makała
Prof. Włodzimierz Mędrzecki
Prof. Małgorzata Omilanowska
Prof. Jacek Purchla
Prof. Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska
Prof. Krzysztof Stefański
Dr. Marek Stępa
Prof. Agnieszka Zabłocka-Kos

Submissions

To submit a conference paper proposal, please:
– download the application form file from the website
– fill in the form (don’t forget to give the correct email address)
– send the filled-in form’s file;
– confirm that you have read the information clause regarding the processing of personal data.

Download the form: APPLICATION FORM CITY AND MEMORY

If you wish to register as a guest (without your own presentation), please do so by clicking below and filling in the appropriate brackets (to read the information clause regarding the processing of personal data please click here).

Organisers

About T. Manteuffel Institute of History Polish Academy of Sciences

The Institute of History was founded in 1953 as a research establishment of the Polish Academy of Sciences – a corporation of scholars as well as a community of institutes representing various branches of learning. The Institute is housed in two joined burgher houses, at Warsaw’s Old Town Square (Kołłątaj’s Side): nos. 29 and 31 – “St. Anne’s” (for more see Polish version).

The founder of the Institute and its first director was an eminent historian of the medieval period Professor Tadeusz Manteuffel (1902–1970).

The Institute conducts research on Polish and World history, from the Middle Ages up to the 20th century. Some of the research projects are being conducted in co-operation with other institutions, both in Poland and other European countries.

The Institute consists of 6 departments (zakłady) and 22 sections (pracownie) of different profiles, mainly chronological or thematic. Some of them conduct research on particular regions of Europe or Poland over longer periods of time.

The part of the Institute is a research library open to all historians.

There is also a PhD programme, that has been run by the Institute since 1969. The Institute has also its own publishing department (Wydawnictwo Instytutu Historii PAN), which since 1991 has been publishing works composed as a part of the Institute’s research plans.

Website: ihpanstary.aionline.dev

About Gdynia City Museum

Gdynia is a unique city in Polish history. It is Poland’s dream of access to the sea come true as well as the most spectacular outcome of Poles’ 20th century modernization efforts. Therefore, it is a city in which modernity and everyday life are intertwined with myths – the myth of the sea, the myth of modernity, the myth of entrepreneurship, the myth of Polishness, the myth of the interwar, the myth of the city. We want to explore the ordinary, everyday history and modernity of the city as well as its various mythologies.

Gdynia is modernity’ – modern politics, economics and architecture or modern transport. As a part of its activity, the Museum explores and presents modernity in its diversity – its good and bad aspects or the relevant and obsolete ones as well as the spectacular and the ordinary, which may be barely noticeable.

Gdynia is a modernist city. Modernism and design are closely intertwined. The modern world is largely a designed world. We are surrounded by completed design projects: buildings, vehicles, objects, prints. We want to present the important, interesting, typical, unique famous of forgotten phenomena in Polish and international design.

Website: muzeumgdynia.pl

Programme and materials

27.10.2021

9:00–9:30 Lecture

Ella Chmielewska, Warsaw Afterimages: Memory and Poetry in Ruins

10:00–12:00 Memory Culture in the Autonomous Galicia (moderation: Aleksander Łupienko)

Tomasz Kargol, Upamiętnianie historii Polski w przestrzeni miast powiatowych autonomicznej Galicji (1861–1918)

Marzena Woźny, O odzyskiwaniu zaginionej pamięci. Archeologia a tożsamość Krakowa w XIX wieku

Elżbieta Lang, Pamięć na cokołach – dyskusja wokół krakowskich pomników

12:30–14:00 Competing Memory Cultures Before 1914 (moderation: Piotr Korduba)

Heidi Hein-Kircher, Forging the Polish substitute capital: Local memory politics in autonomous Lwów

Paweł Lesisz, Pomniki Michaiła Murawiowa, carycy Katarzyny II i Adama Mickiewicza w Wilnie na przełomie XIX i XX wieku. Powstanie – funkcja – znaczenie

Tomasz Jacek Lis, Deislamizacja przestrzeni miejskiej na Półwyspie Bałkańskim w XIX wieku na przykładzie Sarajewa i Belgradu

15:00–17:00 Memory Politics in the Interwar Poland (moderation: Hanna Grzeszczuk-Brendel)

Marcin Jarząbek, Podzielone miasto, a ramy pamięci państw „Nowej Europy”: Cieszyn 1920–1938

Makary Górzyński, Legioniści Feniksa: przestrzenie pamięci oficjalnej w międzywojennej odbudowie Kalisza

Marcin Szerle, Międzywojenna Gdynia – kształtujące się miasto w procesie budowania kultury pamięci

28.10.2021

9:00–9:30 Lecture

Małgorzata Praczyk, Między obsesją a fascynacją. Świadectwa pamięci w przestrzeniach miejskich współczesnych, polskich miast

9:30–10:00 Introduction

Aleksander Łupienko, Miasta dziewiętnastego wieku a kultury pamięci

10:30–13:00 Memory and Places in the City (moderation: Magdalena Praczyk)

Piotr Korduba, Mediować pamięcią. Przypadek Dzielnicy Cesarskiej/Zamkowej/Uniwersyteckiej w Poznaniu (1910–2021)

Paulina Korneluk, Między triumfem a martyrologią – kreacja i mitologizacja zamojskich fortyfikacji od XVII wieku do współczesności

Maria Jonik, Pomnik Mikołaja Kopernika we Wrocławiu a tworzenie kultury pamięci miasta. Możliwe interpretacje

Hanna Kozińska-Witt, Nie-pamięć. Rzecz o Krakowie jako mieście portowym

Hanna Grzeszczuk-Brendel, Prywatność pamięci w przestrzeni publicznej

14:00–16:30 Memory and Identity Through Centuries (moderation: Marcin Szerle)

Anna Kobylińska, Kuźnia – klatka – widmo. Bazy (nie)pamięci miasta Turčiansky Sväty Martin

Lilia Tsyganenko, The memory of the past in multi-ethnic space of the southern Bessarabia

Florian Mausbach, The symbolic image of the Berlin Republic

Wiesław Skrobot, Kody przestrzeni. Uśpione potencjały rozwojowe przedmieść niektórych miast dawnego Oberlandu

29.10.2021

9:00–9:30 Lecture

Jacek Friedrich, “Miasto Gdańsk, niegdyś nasze, będzie znowu nasze!”. Polska pamięć o utraconym mieście

10:00–11:30 Struggle with Memory after 1945 (1) (moderation: Ella Chmielewska)

Daniela Decheva, Inconveniences of memory: The monument to the Soviet army and Georgi Dimitrov’s mausoleum in Sofia after 1989

Sofia Dyak, ‘Old City – Young City’: The local turn and mainstreaming heritage in Soviet Ukrainian Lviv

12:00–13:30 Struggle with Memory after 1945 (2) (moderation: Agnieszka Chmielewska)

Konrad Matyjaszek, Pamiętać, aby nie wiedzieć. Ograniczenia kategorii pamięci zbiorowej wobec miejskich przestrzeni żydowskich we współczesnej Polsce

Jan Szczepański, Reorganizacja “polskiej” przestrzeni Lwowa jako składowa procesu przebudowy tożsamości przestrzeni miasta po 1991 roku

Kamil Śmiechowski, Odzyskiwanie utraconej pamięci. Rewolucja 1905 roku w Łodzi we współczesnej debacie publicznej. Spojrzenie krytyczne

14:30–16:00 Sepulchral Objects as Sanctuaries of Memory (moderation: Edmund Kizik)

Franciszek Skibiński, Dawne epitafia i nagrobki w miastach pruskich wobec przemian tożsamości i pamięci od XVIII do XX w.

Klaudiusz Grabowski, Niechciane dziedzictwo czy kontynuacja modernizacji miasta? Problem likwidacja cmentarzy w Gdańsku po 1945 roku

Marzanna Jagiełło, Monumentum Memoriae Communis: pamięci dawnych mieszkańców naszego miasta