Balřzs Trencsényi: Political History Beyond the Nation State CRSCEES seminar series: Politics on the Edge: Rupture / Transformation / Imagination

Join us on Tuesday, 13th of September at 1-2:30pm on Teams for ‘Political History Beyond the Nation State' with speaker Balřzs Trencsényi, Professor at the Department of History at Central European University in Vienna.

“This presentation draws on the experience gathered while working on the project “Negotiating Modernity”: History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe supported by the European Research Council and hosted by the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia, resulting in the book project (co-written by six scholars and involving another 30 colleagues from and beyond East Central Europe, published by Oxford UP in 2016-18). It envisioned a synthetic history of modern political thought in East Central Europe, providing a basis of intra- and extra-regional comparisons. Seeking to map discourses in their transnational setting and not devising country-chapters, the project aimed at establishing an analytical framework based on transnational categories (such as “integral nationalism,” “agrarian populism,” or “national communism”), thus bringing together the experiences of these cultures into a historical narrative where the principal agents are not nations but intellectual groups, transnational networks of knowledge transfer and also sub-national (regional, urban, minority) contexts. Furthermore, a key feature of our efforts was the “negotiation” of such analytical categories in view of the broader European intellectual framework.”