International Conference “The Past and Future of Public History”
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past”.
George Orwell’s dystopian vision has only gained in relevance since 1984 was published in 1949. With the spread of digital communications technologies, states and individuals are increasingly able to manipulate the population with tendentious narratives of the past.
But the aim of shaping the future through representations of the past need not be nefarious. The German Institute for the History of the National Socialist Era was mandated in 1949 to document, analyse and educate the public about Nazism and its crimes, so they would never be repeated. Based on the German model, institutes of contemporary history spread rapidly, helping to consolidate the postwar democracies of Western Europe.
Established with the aim of consolidating democratic development and European integration, the “memory institutions” of East Central Europe have sometimes been associated with the politicization of historical research, non-inclusive approaches to commemoration, and outdated methods and practices of research. Meanwhile the House of European History was established to implement the idea of European remembrance.
The conference “The Past and Future of Public History” invites participants to consider the establishment of institutes of “contemporary history” after the Second World War, “national memory” after the Cold War and “European Remembrance” after the eastward expansion of the EU as three waves of public history activism, and to consider what the next wave might entail.
Approaches to public history have varied considerably over time and across space, but they are joined by the key concerns of communicating the past while encouraging the participation and engagement of various constituencies.
The conference, which will take place on the 9th-10th of October 2025, will be held at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science of Vilnius University.
We invite you to submit proposals for both individual papers and panels. Please submit your abstract (up to 250 words) along with a short bio by completing this survey by the 31st of March 2025. Selected presenters will be notified on the 19th of May 2025. We strongly encourage on-site participation, but online participation will be possible in individual cases. In the survey, please indicate your preferred mode of participation. The conference language is English. For further information, please contact us at info@europast.vu.lt.
Download the call in PDF format.
This conference is part of a project funded by the European Union under the WIDERA programme (EUROPAST project, grant agreement No. 101079466).
Jan Kubik is a Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University School of Arts and Sciences, Professor of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London, and a visiting professor of Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences. J. Kubik’s research concentrates on studies of civil society, social movements, and protest politics, analysis of the relationship between politics and culture (including the politics of historical memory), and research into democratization, particularly in the context of post-communist transformations. After studying sociology and philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, he obtained his PhD from Columbia University. For the last several years, he has been working on the topic of the rise of right-wing populism in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond. The scientist has co-supervised two large international multi-disciplinary projects supported by the Horizon 2020 funding scheme of the European Commission and aimed at taking stock of the recent rise of populism in the region (FATIGUE and POPREBEL). Jan Kubik has authored more than 7 books, including Anthropology and Political Science: A Convergent Approach (Aronoff, M. and J. Kubik. 2013), Twenty Years After Communism: The Politics of Memory and Commemoration (Bernhard, M. and J. Kubik, eds. 2014), and Postcommunism from Within: Social Justice, Mobilization, and Hegemony (Kubik, J. and A. Linch, eds. 2013). His articles have been published in several prominent journals such as Comparative Politics, East European Politics and Societies, and Sociological Forum.
Sarah Gensburger is a full research professor in political science, a sociologist of memory and an historian of the Holocaust at French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Sciences Po Paris. She served as president of the Memory Studies Association between 2021 and 2024. She curated several exhibitions, public history project and podcast productions. She is the author or co-author of fifteen books on political science, sociology or history, including in English: The Covid-19 Pandemic and Memory. Remembrance, commemoration, and archiving in crisis edited with Orli Fridman, Palgrave, 2024 (in English only); De-Commemoration. Removing statues and renaming streets, edited with Jenny Wustenberg, Berghahn Books, 2023 (translated into French with Fayard, 2023); Administrations of Memory. Transcending the Nation and Bringing back the State in Memory Studies, edited with Sara Dybris McQuaid, Springer, 2022 (in English only) ; Beyond Memory. Can we really learn from the past?, with Sandrine Lefranc, Palgrave, 2020 (translated from French, and also translated in Arabic and Spanish); Memory on my doorstep. Chronicles of the Bataclan Neighborhood (Paris, 2015-2016), Leuven University Press, 2019 (translated from French); Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews. A Photographic Album, Paris 1940-1944, Indiana University Press, 2015 (translated from French) and National Policy, Global Memory. The Commemoration of the Righteous among the Nations from Jerusalem to Paris, Berghahn Books, 2016 (translated from French).
Information is being prepared.
Information is being prepared.
