NEUSTERN is a project exploring how the Austrian government enabled the emergence of a new intellectual elite among the Greek Catholic clergy in Galicia and the impact of this process on the Crownland’s Ruthenian community as a whole.
Tomasz Hen-Konarski’s newest article offers an alternative focus for the study of the Ruthenian nation-building in early Austrian Galicia. Portraying elite Greek Catholic churchmen who made political claims about a self-standing Ruthenian nation already in the first decade of the nineteenth century, it argues that their political innovations were enabled by the ambitious state-building projects implemented in the second half of the eighteenth century by the Habsburg government, most importantly new seminaries that cultivated an ethos of state service among Catholic clergymen. By locating the Galician Ruthenian case in a regional comparative perspective, the article outlines the broader significance of this interpretation, interrogating some received wisdoms about the so-called non-historical nationalisms of Central and Eastern Europe.
Following the warm reception of the Assemani Seminar in 2022 and 2023, we launch our third season. In the six sessions of this seminar series, scholars specialised in different periods and regions will discuss the history of various Eastern Catholic communities from the Middle Ages until today. This year we return to our original format bringing together scholars focused on the Middle East/Mediterranean region with experts in Central and Eastern Europe. The series will open with Julia Buyskykh’s keynote lecture on 19 February.
To register, please email EasternCatholicSeminar@gmail.com.
On 12 December 2023, NEUSTERN’s Tomasz Hen-Konarski will give a talk in HURI’s Pritsak Memorial Library in Cambridge, MA. The presentation will be devoted to the peculiar role played by Galician motifs in the master narrative of the nineteenth-century Ukrainian nation building.
On the website of the Ukraina Modernayou may now read Tomasz Hen-Konarski’s column on the memory of the January Uprising and other historical symbols that could help us to think about the Polish-Ukrainian entanglement.
Following the warm reception of the Assemani Seminar in the first half of 2022, we launch another season, this time focused on East Central Europe. In the ten sessions of this series, scholars specialised in different periods and regions will discuss the history of various Eastern Catholic communities from the early modern period until the twentieth century.
To register, please email EasternCatholicSeminar@gmail.com.
25 October 2022 Anca Șincan (ICSU “Gheorghe Șincai”) “I was never silent again”: Greek Catholic women building the underground church in 1950s Romania
15 November 2022 Michał Jasiński (IHN PAN) Warsaw and Rome: The Significance of Basilian Residences in the West
6 December 2022 Barbara Skinner (Indiana State U) Rethinking the ‘Reunion’ of 1839
10 January 2023 Anatole Upart (RSA) Between Rome and Borderlands: Printed Images and Texts
31 January 2023 Radu Nedici (U of Bucharest) Greek Catholics and Orthodox: Dealing with Confessional Otherness in Habsburg Transylvania, c. 1750s–1760s
21 February 2023 Melchior Jakubowski (IH PAN) Building a Uniate monastery: The Case of Krystynopol, 1763–1781
14 March 2023 Greta-Monica Miron (Babeș-Bolyai U) Image and Confessional Identity in the Bishopric of Făgăraș-Transylvania (18th Century)
4 April 2023 Anna Bisikalo (Harvard U) Young Hearts and Minds: Recruiting a New Generation of Clandestine Greek Catholics in Western Ukraine, 1968–1980
25 April 2023 Wioletta Zielecka-Mikołajczyk (Copernicus U in Toruń) One of Many or an Original? Organization of the Uniate Diocese of Przemyśl against the Background of the Kyiv Metropolis of the Eighteenth Century
16 May 2023 Frank Sysyn (U of Alberta) Religious Union and the Formation of Confessional Allegiance: The Transformation of Rus’ through the Union of Brest
On 9 June 2022, NEUSTERN’s Tomasz Hen-Konarski will give a talk within the framework of the “Kyivan Christianity” Seminar in the Humanities Faculty of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. The presentation will be devoted to the educational policies implemented by the Austrian government among the Greek Catholic clergy in the late eighteenth century.
On 26 May 2022, NEUSTERN’s Tomasz Hen-Konarski will give a talk within the framework of the Seminar on the History of Education and Cultural Anthropology in the Institute for the History of Science, Polish Academy of Sciences. The presentation will be devoted to the educational policies implemented by the Austrian government among the Greek Catholic clergy in the late eighteenth century.
Poland’s main funding bodies, NCN and FNP, offer programmes dedicated to scholars fleeing Ukraine. Ukrainian students can find useful information on Polish higher education on the website of NAWA.
Follow the links below for relevant Ukraine-focused sections of the respective websites:
