15-17 June 2017

Although the Baltic Sea has been one of the world’s greatest cultural crossroads, scholars often have overlooked cultural exchange in favor of exploring national and regional identities. Since the 1990s, the concept of a Baltic Sea Region encompassing the sea and its surrounding land has fostered transnational thinking about the region, transcending Cold War binaries of ‘East’ and ‘West’ in an effort to view the area more holistically. Still, common terminology such as ‘Scandinavia’ and ‘the Baltic States’, suggests these cultures are mutually exclusive, or, as the case with ‘Central and Eastern Europe’, ambiguously monolithic. While historians have been examining the Baltic Sea Region — present-day Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Russia, and Sweden — as an important center of cross-cultural interaction, the area’s visual and material culture is often reduced to illustrative examples of historical phenomena and art historical narratives continue to be tethered to national and ethnocentric approaches, a bias this conference seeks to complicate. By foregrounding visual and material exchanges and the ideological or pragmatic factors that motivated them, we seek to establish common ground for viewing the Baltic Sea as a nexus of intertwined, fluctuating individuals and cultures always in conversation.

TIINA ABEL (Tallinn), KATHARINA ALSEN (Berlin), LAURA BACK (Canberra), ŁUKASZ BUKOWIECKI (Warsaw), SIGNE ENDRESEN (Oslo), EVELIINA JUNTUNEN (Bamberg), INGA KARLŠTRĒMA (Riga), EMILIANA KONOPKA (Warsaw), IRENA KOSSOWSKA (Toruń), ANNA-CAROLA KRAUSSE (Berlin), DACE LAMBERGA (Riga), THOR J. MEDNICK (Toledo), MICHAEL NORTH (Greifswald), RUTH NOYES (Connecticut), ALICE PRICE (Philadelphia), BART PUSHAW (Maryland), INEZ SIRICA (Riga), NADEZHDA STANULEVICH (St. Petersburg), BAIBA TETERE (Riga / Greifswald), BAIBA VANAGA (Riga), TORSTEN VEIT (Greifswald)

CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS Professor Dr. Michelle Facos (Bloomington) ∙ Bart Pushaw (Maryland)

CONFERENCE VENUE Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald ∙ Martin-Luther-Straße 14 ∙ D-17489 Greifswald

INFORMATION AND REGISTRATION Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald · Tagungsbüro Christin Klaus M. A. · D-17487 Greifswald · Phone +49 (0) 3834 / 420-5029 · christin.klaus@wiko-greifswald.de · www.wiko-greifswald.de

The Conference is funded by the International Research Training Group “Baltic Borderlands“ of the German Research Foundation and the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung, Essen.

For more information please click here
Plakat_Visual_Culture_final.pdf
Programm_Visual_Culture.pdf