The Patriotism of the Expatriates - Part B

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,  

2^nd Floor Conference Room – Main Building

WORKSHOP PROGRAMME
9:30- 10:00	Welcome note & Introductory remarks: Nicos PERISTIANIS (University of Nicosia) Maurizio ISABELLA (Queen Mary, University of London)
10:00- 10:40	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.
10:40-10:55	Discussion
10:55-11:15	Coffee break
11:15-12:15	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
12:15-12:30	Discussion
12:30-14:00	LUNCH
14:00-15:00	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)
15:00-15:30	Discussion
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
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.