Annual Conference of the Institute for Danube Swabian History and Regional Studies

The conference engages with questions about the place of the east of Europe within the global history of settler colonialism and asks how can theoretical elaborations from the burgeoning field of settler colonial studies contribute to a better understanding of processes of settling, unsettling, resettling, and of processes of internal colonization and land reclamation in the east of Europe. It tests the relevance of concepts and understandings of ‘settlerness’ and ‘indigeneity’ for the study of the east of Europe and of the entanglements of the east of Europe with the rest of the world and looks for possibilities to refine the theoretical tenets of settler colonial studies through the study of the east of Europe.

Despite a growing discussion of the role and the place of the east of Europe within the global history of colonialism and despite the increasing application of postcolonial theories to the study of the east of Europe, there lacks a concerted engagement with settler colonialism and with ‘settlerness’ in the region. This is a surprising omission, considering the numerous threads and even knots linking the history of settler colonialism with the history of the east of Europe. Examples include internal colonization and frontier settlement processes in continental empires, concurrent with transatlantic settler colonization, the importance of settlerness in the ethnopolitical identifications of various Germanophone groups in the east of Europe (Transylvanian Saxons, Danube Swabians, or Russian Germans), or the migration-colonization nexus undergirding various Eastern European projects of transatlantic emigration.

The conference “Settling and Unsettling: Towards a ‘Settler Turn’ in the Study of the East of Europe (1700s – Present) will foster a productive dialogue between settler colonial studies and Eastern European history and Eastern European studies.

Further information can be found in the conference flyer.

With the support of: