CENTRAL Workshop 2025: Materialities of Memory in Central, East and South-East Europe

Last week, four RCMS members – Kateřina Králová, Tereza Juhászová, Ivana Koutníková and Claudia Macey, joined colleagues from Warsaw, Berlin, Vienna and Budapest at the CENTRAL Workshop 2025: Materialities of Memory in Central, East and South-East Europe!

Over three days, researchers explored how memory takes shape through monuments, archives, literature, urban spaces, and everyday objects — from the politics of socialist-era graffiti and monuments, to post-migrant narratives and the heritage of post-imperial spaces.

Prof. Králová chaired the panel on Memory and Knowledge Production, which featured papers on Roma academics’ struggles with cultural narratives, historical questionnaires, Albanian-Kosovar literature, and contested memories in the Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish borderlands.

Tereza Juhászová presented her work on Navigating Turbulent Times: A Microhistory of a Multilingual Small Town in Mid-20th Century Slovakia and Ivana Koutnikova introduced her paper on Documenting Memory Through Scientific Inquiry: The Role of Questionnaires in Reconstructing the Experience of Czechoslovak Citizens in Sweden in 1945. Claudia Macey introduced her work on Different Apocalypse: How was Literary Postmodernism Reinterpreted in Central and Eastern Europe between 1989 and 2023 as a Direct Reaction to the Memory of Socialism?