Action, experience and emotion are the focus when it comes to performativity. In cultural studies, the performative turn has shifted the focus away from texts and structures to inquiries into actions performed and the bodily experiences involved in creating collective meaning. In the field of history terms such as “living history,” “doing history” and “reenactment” have been established to characterize the experiential component of various practices of reviving, restaging and appropriating events from the past in the present. The phenomena in question include battle reenactments and reconstructions of the past in museums, computer games and theme-based tourist attractions. Precise definitions and exact terminological distinctions have yet to be established, however.

While research into the phenomena of living history has spread beyond the English-speaking world to include Western and Central Europe, it is still in its infancy in East-Central and Southeastern Europe. The planned workshop takes this as its starting point, inquiring into the specific forms of living history in this region. Apart from the description of individual phenomena, the varied analytical approaches to this field used by researchers in various disciplines will be presented and discussed at the workshop. Comparative approaches too, focusing on different regions at once, are more than welcome.

Workshop participants will be selected based on their paper dealing with the above-mentioned questions and with other aspects relevant to the topic of the workshop.

Please send your paper of no more than 2,000 words as well as a short biography in English to Sabine Stach: stach@dhi.waw.pl and Juliane Tomann: juliane.tomann@uni-jena.de by October 30, 2016.