In February 2016, the Romanian Cultural Institute hosted a joint event with the Polish Cultural Institute and ACF London on the theme of ‘Identities In-between: the Ethno-national Under Scrutiny: East-Central Europe, c. 1900 – present’.

Following extensive research on the complexities of national belonging and pluralism in East-Central Europe, Oxford Brookes University’s Marius Turda together with University of Oxford’s Jan Fellerer and Robert Pyrah build further on the theme and showcase new topics at this second event. The focus remains on cases from the region where liminal, marginal or complex historical cases challenge the dominant discourse of identity as defined in very narrow ethnic terms, both in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and with echoes today.

Jan Fellerer took up the post of University Lecturer in non-Russian Slavonic Languages at the University of Oxford, Wolfson College (UK) after a few years at the Department of Slavonic Philology at the University of Basel, Switzerland. His main research interests lie in the fields of Polish, Czech and Ukrainian linguistics and philology with special reference to the modern period from the 18th century to the present day. His current work focuses on Polish and Slavonic grammar, and on linguistic identity-formation in multilingual East Central European cities at the beginning of the 20th century.

Robert Pyrah, of Wolfson College at the University of Oxford, is a historian specialising in post-Habsburg identity politics in East-Central Europe from 1918, with special emphasis on Austria, Poland and Ukraine. He jointly runs the research project 'Sub-Cultures as Integrative Forces in East-Central Europe, 1900-present', which explores phenomena that fall outside traditional nation-building projects. 

Marius Turda is Director of Centre for Medical Humanities at Oxford Brookes and former Director of the Cantemir Institute at the University of Oxford. His current areas of research are racism and race, history of eugenics, theories of ethnic specificity and national character, and ethnic utopias, with a special reference to East-Central Europe. 

The panel is organised jointly by the Romanian Cultural Institute, Austrian Cultural Forum, Polish Cultural Institute, University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes University.

Free entry but please book your seat on Eventbrite.