Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Tuesday, June 11, 2019 in Conferences, Events, HART, News, Vanderbilt University, VRC.

Partly inspired by the publication of Jan Gross’s book Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland more than fifteen years ago, historians, social scientists, linguists and other observers of eastern Europe have recently produced exciting studies about coexistence, conflict and why violence unfolds in specific spaces at precise moments. They seek to answer what is, according to historian John Connelly, the most vexing question for Poland and the entirety of east central Europe: “How (did) ethnic communities that had coexisted more or less peacefully for generations, often in fruitful cross-pollination (dissolve) in fear, hate and recrimination from the middle of the 20th century onward?”

Matthew Worsnick, assistant professor of the practice of art history, will present his paper entitled “Mapping the Margins: National borders, transnational networks, and images of coherence in Italy and Yugoslavia” on June 11 at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. The overall theme is “Neighbors? Relationships and Rootedness in Eastern Europe across the 20th Century.”

The workshop has assembled an interdisciplinary group of scholars, Worsnick among them, who are experts in urban planning, political science, social anthropology and history. Sponsors are the Université Libre de Bruxelles, the Fulbright Commission for Educational Exchange between the United States of America, Belgium and Luxembourg, and the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.