Research Project “When Rural Meets Urban: Towards a Cultural History of Modernisms in Bohemia” (2022-2024)

Project funded by Fondation Wiener-Anspach – in collaboration with Oxford University

This project launches a major collaboration between ULB and Oxford to write a cultural history of Modernism in Bohemia that challenges the dominant center-periphery narratives by combining study of national contexts with tracing transnational networks. In their Wiener-Anspach Foundation-funded project, Petra James (ULB) and Rajendra Chitnis (FWA) are developing a major grant proposal for a comparative study of regionally specific modernisms in Europe. We shall co-author a monograph on attempts to synthesize rural cultural identities with cosmopolitan urban modernity and write a major grant bid. To refine our research questions and identify co-investigators from ULB, Oxford and beyond, we shall organize workshops at both institutions (29-30 September 2022 at ULB and 13-14 April 2023 at Oxford) that will gather researchers who specialize in different aspects of various European modernisms. Our work will strengthen the status of ULB Slavic Studies in Belgium and the identity of East-Central European Studies at Oxford, allowing for sustained sharing of practice between the Czech sections, and establish the two institutions as a center for research into Central European modernism.

Promoters
• Petra James, MODERNITAS, ULB
• Rajendra Anand Chitnis, Faculty of Russian and Slavonic Studies, University of Oxford