THE PATRIOTISM OF THE EXPATRIATES
Diasporas and national consciousness
between Europe, the Mediterranean and beyond in the long 19th century
[History Conference, Part B]
Cyprus Center for European
and International Affairs – University of Nicosia, Cyprus &
Queen Mary, University of
London
18 February 2012, University of Nicosia,
2nd Floor Conference Room – Main Building
WORKSHOP PROGRAMME
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9:30- 10:00
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Welcome note & Introductory remarks:
Nicos PERISTIANIS (University of
Nicosia)
Maurizio ISABELLA
(Queen Mary, University of London)
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10:00- 10:40
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SESSION 1
Chair: Emilios SOLOMOU (CCEIA - University of Nicosia)
Artan PUTO ("Marin
Barleti" University, Tirana), The
idea of nation in the writings of Sami Frasheri and Faik Konitza
Vaso SEIRINIDOU
(University of Athens), Between
nation and empire: Balkan intellectuals in the Habsburg Monarchy, late 18th -
19th c.
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10:40-10:55
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Discussion
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10:55-11:15
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Coffee break
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11:15-12:15
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SESSION 2
Chair: Daphne LAPPA (EUI, Florence & AHDR, Cyprus)
Dominique Kirchner REILL
(University of Miami), Exiled or Homeward Bound? The Slippery case of Place in the Era
before Nation States
Antonio D’ ALESSANDRI (Università
Roma Tre), Historical Nation vs. Ethnic
Nation: Romanian and Hungarian exiles
in Western Europe after 1849
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12:15-12:30
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Discussion
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12:30-14:00
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LUNCH
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14:00-15:00
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SESSION 3
Chair: Nicos PERISTIANIS
“EXPATRIATES” Project – Presentation of research results:
Konstantina ZANOU (IPE
& CCEIA - University of Nicosia)
Discussants:
Antonis LIAKOS
(University of Athens)
Maurizio ISABELLA
(Queen Mary, University of London)
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15:00-15:30
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Discussion
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Abstracts:
ARTAN PUTO, The idea of nation in the writings of Sami
Frasheri and Faik Konitza
The
paper will explore the idea of nation in the writings of Shemseddin Sami
Frashëri and Faik Konitza. Both authors are held to be among the most
important figures of the Albanian National Movement (1878-1912). Shemseddin
Sami Frashëri (1850-1904) lived and worked most of his life time in Istanbul
and he was an important Ottoman and a modernist Turkish intellectual, but at
the same time one of the leading figures of the Albanian nationalism of the
late nineteenth century. I will try to explain the coherence of this triple
“identity” by putting him in the post-Tanzimat Ottoman political and cultural
context, but also taking into account the raising trajectory of Balkan
nationalisms. Faik Konitza (1876-1942) was another important Albanian
nationalist intellectual of late nineteenth century and the final phase of
the National Movement of early twentieth century, who spent most of his time
in the West and later in the USA. He is mostly known as the publisher of one
of the most important magazines of the time “Albania” (1897-1909), and as one
of the most active Albanian intellectuals of his generation to have laid the
foundation of the modern Albanian language. My paper will focus on the way
these authors imagined a modern Albanian “nation” by emphasizing the
differences as related to different context where they lived and worked.
VASO SEIRINIDOU, Between nation and empire: Balkan
intellectuals in the Habsburg Monarchy, late 18th - 19th c.
The
private library catalogue of a minor Greek scholar living in Vienna in the
turn of the 18th to the 19th century served here as impetus for reflecting
about “major” and “minor” intellectual scenes in the age of the Enlightenment
as well as about the “centers” and the “peripheries” of the national literary
canons.
As
organic intellectual of the Greek entrepreneurial diaspora in the Habsburg
empire, Dimitrios Darvaris, belongs among those scholars whose traces did not
survive in the national historic memory. With his work concentrated on the
field of textbooks and children literature, Darvaris did not participate in
the debate of the “major” Greek intellectual scene of his time, a fact that
anticipated his marginal position within the Greek national literary canon.
Using
the library catalogue as source for tracing knowledge production and
communication, this paper proposes an inverse perspective in viewing
Darvaris’ work. It relocates the latter from the periphery of the Greek major
intellectual scene and the margins of the literary canon, to the center of a
smaller community of scholars engaged in matters of Greek-speaking education
in the Habsburg empire; it reevaluates it as the Greek-speaking contribution to the broader intellectual project that
developed in the Habsburg empire with the participation of scholars from
different ethnic groups, aiming at the standardization of the linguistic
education in a time, when language was becoming the basic ingredient for the
creation of national identities.
DOMINIQUE KIRCHNER REILL, Exiled or Homeward Bound? The Slippery
case of Place in the Era before Nation States
With
the new transnational turn, scholars of nationalism have looked to the
experience of the physical displacement of activists and intellectuals as a
prime means to reassemble the international circulation of ideas. For, after
all, Herder wrote some of his most stimulating work while sailing across the
North Seas. Mazzini scribbled and debated in England longer than he ever
resided in Italy. Kossuth spent over half of his life everywhere but Hungary.
Mickiewicz attracted world attention not from the medieval burgs of Lithuania,
but from the Parisian university podiums. Garibaldi regularly fell off the
peninsular grid, explaining the global commemorations of his stays in New York
City, Taganrog (Russia), and Garibaldi (Brazil). Scholars of exile have given
us the necessary reminder of how transnational nationalism was (and is).
However, much remains unclear in trying to ascertain the contours of exile.
Though there can be no doubt that travel and living “abroad” informed the shape
and texture of nineteenth‐century activists’ ideas and the strategies they
chose to make their ideas real, what remains unclear is how far “home” and
“away” really extended in a world of mini‐city‐states, broad continental (and
transoceanic) empires, tariff unions, and the introduction of railways and steamships.
If you are exiled from Florence and move to Nice in 1840, to what extent can
and should your experiences be compared with those of Mazzini, Kossuth, Mickiewicz,
or Garibaldi? Did the Risorgimento activist Niccolò Tommaseo’s periods of
exile in Corfu and Corsica, where he lived out two of his exiles in order to
feel closer to his adopted homeland Italia and his boyhood homeland Dalmatia,
signify a profoundly different sort of experience than that of the journalist
and political activist Pacifico Valussi, who wandered between Friuli,
Trieste, Venice, and Milan? By comparing the experiences of Tommaseo and
Valussi ‐‐ two friends, collaborators, and outspoken advocates for a greater
Adriatic multi‐national regionalism – I will examine the perplexities of what
we mean by exile, home, and abroad and their influence on national thought.
ANTONIO D’ALESSANDRI, Historical Nation
vs. Ethnic Nation: Romanian and Hungarian exiles in Western Europe after 1849
The
aim of this paper is to investigate how Romanian and Hungarians exiles, after
the revolutions in their homeland during the ‘Spring of Nations’, have
discussed and quarrelled with each other about the events of 1848-49. Through
the dispute about the Transylvanian question, it will be pointed out how
differently the Romanian and Hungarian exiles conceived their own national
identity through the opposition between historical and ethnic rights. These
debates, developed in France and England, were influenced by western European
ideologies and prominent politicians and intellectuals of different
countries, such as the Italian Giuseppe Mazzini in the framework of the Central European
Democratic Committee
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Participants:
ANTONIO D’ALESSANDRI
He is
currently adjunct professor of history in the Faculty of Political Sciences
of Roma Tre University where he obtained (2006) a PhD in history of political
thought. He has been postdoctoral fellow (2008-2009) of the Institute of
Modern and Contemporary History (IHMC) at the École normale supérieure of
Paris. He is also Secretary of the Italian Association of South-East European
Studies (AISSEE). His main research interests concern the contemporary
history of the Balkans.
MAURIZIO ISABELLA
Maurizio
Isabella is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at Queen Mary,
University of London. He studied Italian literature and Modern History at the
University of Milan. He then went on to take a Masters? degree in European
Studies at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he also obtained his
doctoral degree in 1998. After a stage at the European Commission, Maurizio
worked for five years in Brussels, first as Assistant to the Secretary
General of UNICE, the representation of European Industry to the European
Institutions, and then as consultant and political analyst advising companies
and trade associations on European policies. In 2004 he visited CRASSH, the
Centre for the Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at
Cambridge University, and has been Research Fellow at Birkbeck College,
London, where he has taught Modern European History. In 2006, he held the
Stanley J Seeger fellowship with the Program in Hellenic Studies, Princeton
University. His research focuses on the political thought and the
intellectual and cultural history of the Risorgimento. He is particularly
interested in the study of international intellectual history in the
nineteenth century, and in the relationship between European and Italian
political thought and nationalism. His book Risorgimento in Exile, published
by Oxford University press in 2009, studies exile in early nineteenth century
as an intellectual experience, and assesses early Italian liberalism and
patriotism as part of transatlantic and pan-European ideological currents.
DAPHNE LAPPA (chair)
Daphne
Lappa was born in Athens, Greece. She obtained her undergraduate degree in
Early Modern and Modern History at the University of Crete, Rethymno. She
then attained the MA Programme in Early Modern Greek History at the
University of Athens and also earned an MA at the European University
Institute of Florence. Daphne is currently completing her PhD at the
Department of History and Civilization of the European University Institute
in Florence. Her doctoral project addresses the issue of religious conversion
and the relationship amongst Jews, Christians and Muslims in the
Mediterranean at the age of Enlightenment. She has research experience in the
fields of social, cultural and urban history and has worked extensively with
archival material of diverse periods and nature.
ANTONIS LIAKOS
Antonis
Liakos (1947) is professor of contemporary history and history of
historiography at the University of Athens, chair of the Board of the
International Commission for History and Τheory of Historiography (2010-2015)
and managing editor of Historein. His
last book is Apocalypse, Utopia and the
Formation of National Consciousness (Athens, Polis, 2011).
NICOS PERISTIANIS
Nicos
Peristianis is President of the Council of the University of Nicosia and,
until recently, President of the Cyprus Sociological Association. He holds a
Doctorate in Sociology from Middlesex University, UK. He is Managing Editor
of The Cyprus Review, a bi-annual
refereed journal which focuses on social, economic and political issues
pertinent to Cyprus. He recently co-edited the books Divided Cyprus: Modernity, History, and an Island in Conflict
(Indiana University Press, 2006) and Britain
in Cyprus: Colonialism and Post-Colonialism (Bibliopolis, 2006). His
research interests include nationalism, ethnic conflict, and identity
formation.
ARTAN PUTO
Artan
Puto studied history at Tirana University (1988) and completed his Master
Degree in History at Central European University Budapest (CEU, 1995). He
holds a PhD from the Department of History and Civilization of the European
University Institute of Florence (EUI, 2010) on the subject The Idea of Nation during the Albanian
National Movement, 1878-1912. He is
currently working as a history professor at the Department of Political
Sciences at "Marin Barleti" University of Tirana.
DOMINIQUE KIRCHNER REILL
Dominique
Reill studied at UC Berkeley, Universita' di Bologna, Columbia University in
New York, and the Filozofski Fakultet in Zagreb. She holds a Ph.D. (2007)
from Columbia University in Modern European History. Her first book, titled Nationalists Who Feared the Nation:
Adriatic Multi-Nationalism in Habsburg Dalmatia, Trieste and Venice, was
published with Stanford University Press in 2012. She is currently an
Assistant Professor at the University of Miami (Florida) where she is working
on her next book-length manuscript tentatively titled Rebel City: Fiume's Challenge to Wilson's Europe, 1918-1922.
EMILIOS SOLOMOU (chair)
Emilios
Solomou is the Vice-President for Administration of the University of
Nicosia and faculty member of the Department of European Studies and
International Relations. He started his career at the English School
Nicosia, where he served as a History teacher, Head of the History
Department, Senior Teacher, Deputy Head Teacher and Acting Head Teacher.
Since 2000, he has been teaching Cyprus History on the M.A. in International
Relations Programme, and Cyprus History and History Teaching Methodology on
the B.A. in Primary Education programme at the University of Nicosia. He has participated in many seminars and conferences
on the Theory, Methodology and Teaching of History, as well as on Conflict
Resolution, and made presentations on the Teaching of History. He has also
contributed to a number of European projects with emphasis on ethnicity and
co-operation. Emilios Solomou is a Fellow of the Historical Association of
Great Britain and has been an active member of many Professional Associations
and Organizations in Cyprus, the UK and the USA.
VASO SEIRINIDOU
Lecturer
in Modern Greek History in the Department of History and Archeology/
University of Athens. She wrote her PhD Thesis on the history of the Greek
diaspora in Vienna during the 18th and the first half of the 19th century.
Her interest has been concentrated on various aspects of the Greek migration
in the Habsburg Empire as well as on the on the history and historiography of
migration and diasporas. She has published one book (in Greek) and several
articles in Greek, German, and English. Her second book “The laboratory of
the scholar. Scholarly production and communication in the Age of the
Enlightenment through an early 19 th century library catalogue” is
forthcoming in 2012 (in Greek). Current
research fields: intellectual history, environmental history
KONSTANTINA ZANOU
Konstantina
Zanou studied Modern History at the University of Athens, Birkbeck College of
London, École Normale Supérieure de Paris and Scuola Normale Superiore di
Pisa. She holds a Ph.D. (2007) from the University of Pisa – title: Expatriate intellectuals and national identity:
Andrea Mustoxidi in Italy, France and Switzerland (1802-1829). She is also holder
of the European
Doctorate in the Social History of Europe and the Mediterranean (2007). She is currently a
Postdoctoral Fellow (Research Promotion Foundation of Cyprus/“DIDAKTOR” Programme), affiliated as a
researcher to the University of Nicosia, Cyprus.
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