Projects

The Many Roads in Modernity aims to study the relationship between the modern history of South-East Europe and the region’s long past as a meeting-point for people, ideas, trade and armies. The focus of the projects is on the changes of identity, self-representation and affiliation in the light of the political, cultural and religious transformations triggered by the interaction between external influences and local and regional practice from the latter part of the nineteenth century to the present day.

What the individual studies have in common is their empirical approach based on extensive fieldwork and archival studies. The starting point is the regional angle and local reactions to cultural and political changes in the rest of Europe. The perspectives are deliberately transnational and trans-epochal in order to investigate the changing conditions of modernity and different political modernization projects in South-East Europe.

The results from The Many Roads in Modernity require, in addition, close interdisciplinary cooperation in the group with its participants’ differing but complementary academic backgrounds. The studies in the project have been developed so that they examine a theme, a region, or a historical period from different angles. The regular forum for the joint activities is the residential seminars, where internationally acknowledged scholars are invited to comment on work in progress. In addition, leading specialists on the three periods covered by the project are invited to the workshops and conferences arranged by The Many Roads in Modernity.