The Early Slavic Studies association is proud to announce this year’s sponsored panel at the ASEEES convention in Boston with the title of “Fear and Angst in Early Modern East Central Europe”
It is a conspicuous and also disturbing reality that Eastern European studies in North America is constantly filled with a staunch sense of presentism and a strong attachment
to political memory. Meanwhile, Slavic national history writing, even until today, often carries a lachrymose tone haunted by a lingering romanticism. Given these facts, can
we recount premodern Slavic experiences in their own rights without any modern or modernist disturbance? Can we study feelings and passions without falling victim to the
nationalist sentimentality? Therefore, the goal of this panel is to plot out new ways to (re)write fear and angst in the Slavic (far) past that is liberated from the tragic and
pathetic tropes commonly present in the teleological historiography of Eastern Europe. Drawing on recent methodology and discourse of affect and emotionality, we are eager to build original dialogues between early modern Eastern European history and history of emotions, along with cultural history, religious history, ecological history, utopian history, and historical theory. In specific, the four papers in this panel are going to grapple with various “negative” emotional moments of early modern Czechia, Poland, and Ukraine – from utopian anxiety and royal angst to the lamentation of loss and the spectacle of the passion – and offer case studies of how to define Slavic sensibility in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Composed of historians, art historians, and literary critics, this panel also hopes to promote visibility and interdisciplinarity of the long-marginalized field of premodern east-central Europe at ASEEES and beyond.
Chair: Barbara Skinner (Indiana State University)
Papers:
Václav Zheng (Johns Hopkins University), “Poland is Falling: Stanisław Orzechowski and his Utopian Anxiety”
Phillip Haberkern (Boston University): “Trauma, Loss, and Lamentation in the Writings of Jan Amos Comenius”
Tomasz Grusiecki (Boise State University): “Royal Angst: The Last Aurochs Habitat and its Artistic Reanimations”
Maria Grazia Bartolini (University of Milan): “‘Teach us how to Weep’: The Spectacle of the Passion in Early Modern Ukraine.”
Discussant: Frank Sysyn (University of Alberta)
