International Workshop
27–28 August 2026 | Prague, Czechia
Submission deadline: 31 March 2026
The Bridging Histories and Cultures in the Black Sea Region (BridgeBSR) working group, with the support of The Center for Governance and Culture in Europe, University of St. Gallen (GCE-HSG) and the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), University of Alberta (Edmonton), is pleased to invite paper proposals for an international workshop in Prague.
The Black Sea region has historically served as a vibrant crossroads where empires, communities, and mobile groups have engaged in the negotiation of power, identity, and everyday coexistence.
BridgeBSR views the region not as a peripheral "borderland" between competing imperial powers, but as a dynamic space of cross-cultural exchange, shaped by local agency, pragmatic adaptations, and transboundary networks.
Building on New Imperial History and related approaches, the workshop shifts attention from state-centered narratives to the everyday practices of local actors—migrants, intermediaries, traders, religious minorities, frontier communities, and local elites—who actively influenced governance, economic cooperation, and cultural exchange. We are particularly interested in "middle ground" situations where rules and hierarchies were negotiated, leading to the emergence of hybrid forms of social order.
Although the project’s core focus is on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the workshop invites welcomes proposals that explore the Northern, Western, and Eastern Black Sea littoral from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, particularly those that shed light on long-term transformations in borders, mobility regimes, and inter-imperial entanglements.
The workshop is designed as a discussion-driven forum organized into thematic panels, in-depth feedback and the exchange of methodologies.
We invite applications from researchers in history and related disciplines, including PhD candidates, postdoctoral researchers, faculty, and independent scholars. Interdisciplinary perspectives are highly encouraged.
Topics of interest (non-exhaustive):
- Transcultural contact zones in the Black Sea region
- Migration, resettlement, displacement, and mobility regimes of humans and non-humans
- Border formation, frontier practices, and imperial peripheries
- Local communities as agents of imperial governance and negotiation
- Informal networks, patronage, intermediaries, and local elites
- Trade, commodities, economic cooperation, cooperative labor, smuggling
- Interethnic and interreligious coexistence; minorities, tolerance/conflict
- Food practices, dietary regimes, identity formation, and everyday multiculturalism
- Multiple trajectories, dynamics and forms of interaction between Cossacks, Nogais, Crimean Tatars, Russians, Ottomans, and others, and their wider contexts
The organizers intend to develop a thematic edited volume based on the workshop. Participants will have the opportunity to submit revised papers.
Please send a single PDF (including your abstract of up to 500 words and a short CV) to bridgebsr.wg@gmail.com by 31 March 2026.
The workshop will be held in English.
Limited travel and accommodation support may be available for. If you wish to be considered for funding, please indicate this in your application email.
The organizers of the workshop are BridgeBSR working group:
Vladyslav Hrybovs’kyi (NASU, Kyiv)
Svitlana Kaiuk (Dnipro National University)
Julia Malitska (Södertörn University)
Volodymyr Poltorak (Oriental Institute CAS, Prague)
Nataliya Sureva (Ruhr University Bochum)
