It has been a busy but productive inaugural year for the Department of Historical Studies. We launched our MA in Museum Studies with a highly motivated and creative international cohort; hosted many conferences, workshops and public lectures; took students on field trips across Vienna and Central Europe; and, between all of this, took and taught classes, wrote essays and gave presentations, and successfully defended PhD dissertations and MA theses.
The year opened with two international conferences: Religion in Transformation (CESAR), and Human Nature – Humans and Nature in the History of Political Thought (7th Biennial European Society for the History of Political Thought). We continued to keep our events coordinator busy with lunchtime seminars, more international conferences, and the Natalie Zemon Davis Memorial Lectures by Lorraine Daston in the winter term. As part of the EurAsian Transformations Cluster of Excellence, we organized and hosted workshops, conferences and poster sessions. The year ended with a noted focus on the Eastern Mediterranean with the 3rd Annual Late Antique and Byzantine Conference (co-organized with the University of Vienna), an inaugural Ottoman Studies workshop, and the Second Gutenberg Symposium, titled “Education and Literature in a Medieval Eurasian Context.”
We also launched an Advanced Certificate in Digital Humanities, led by our new colleague Prof. Aliz Horvath, and prepared the Advanced Certificate in Cultural Heritage, to be launched in September 2025.
We celebrated the successes of our PhD students as they defended dissertations on topics as diverse as the late antique soul, Malayam-Syriac religious texts, and Yugoslav supermarkets. Our MA theses reflected the department’s strengths in medieval philosophy, Ottoman Studies and Central and Eastern Europe, whilst also embracing topics that ranged from medieval monasticism to modern India. We also said goodbye to longstanding and esteemed colleagues, Prof. Marsha Siefert, Prof. Alice Choyke, and Csilla Dobos as they retired.
Next year promises to be just as busy. EurAsia Transformations’ events include a workshop on the Mongols, we’ll be considering epidemics with the Natalie Zemon Davis Memorial Lectures, delivered by Sherene Sekaily and enjoying many more classes, lectures, defenses and social events!