Revivals of Empire – Nostalgia, Amnesia, Tribulation

The research project REVENANT will examine contemporacollective memories and legacies of the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov Empires from a capacious, comparative perspective.

Across the broad geography of central and eastern Europe, the Balkans, central Asia and the Caucasus, and the Middle East, bygone imperial projects are increasingly inseparable from contemporary political and cultural life.

REVANANT will constitute the first comprehensive research project to grapple with these complex, overlapping post-imperial memories and legacies.

Our overarching research question is: How do collective memories of the Habsburg, Ottoman and Romanov Empires achieve articulation through ensembles of persons, places and things? The threefold heuristic of persons, places, and things determines three secondary research questions. First, how and why do certain historical personages galvanize collective memories of empires?

Secondly, how do specific places become sites of post-imperial memory? Thirdly, how are bygone empires embodied through a variety of objects and material culture?

The research for REVENANT will be resolutely interdisciplinary, drawing on insights from Anthropology, Sociology, History, Comparative Literature, Art and Architectural History, Memory Studies, and Material Culture Studies.

Accordingly, it will rely on a variety of methods, including participant observation, visual ethnography, archival research, targeted interviews with key actors, and discourse analysis.

In addition to the principal investigator, the research group will consist of three postdoctoral fellows and three doctoral students.

REVENANT will be based at the Cultural Studies Department of the University of Rijeka, Croatia; Rijeka will also be one of the project's research sites.

The envisioned results and outputs of REVENANT include a variety of scholarly publications and academic symposia, as well as a documentary film, a photographic exhibition, and a multi-faceted project website.