On September 28, 1998, Jürgen Habermas’s Die postnationale Konstellation: Politische Essays was released by Suhrkamp Verlag, registering the arrival of a new social phenomenon: the postnational situation. It did not mean that national solidarity and nationalism had become obsolete, only that they no longer held a monopoly on social organization and likely functioned differently than they had earlier in the twentieth century. Habermas proposed several political forms for accommodating the postnational situation. Over the next 27 years, some of them proved more realistic than others. In parallel, several approaches to postnational analysis were developed and tested in the social sciences and humanities. I will briefly survey these dynamics and discuss the reasons for the persistence of a nation-centric approach even in the attempts to defy nationalist narratives.
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Ilya Gerasimov (Candidate of Sciences in History, Kazan University and PhD in History, Rutgers University) is a co-founder and the executive editor of Ab Imperio: Studies of New Imperial History and Nationalism in the Post-Soviet Space. He has published several books and edited volumes, including A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia: From Russian to Global History (Bloomsbury: vol. 1, 2023; vol. 2, 2024); Plebeian Modernity: Social Practices, Illegality, and the Urban Poor in Russia, 1905–1917 (University of Rochester Press, 2018), Modernism and Public Reform in Late Imperial Russia: Rural Professionals and Self-Organization, 1905–30 (Palgrave, 2009), and Empire Speaks Out: Languages of Rationalization and Self-description in the Russian Empire (Brill, 2009). He is the author of numerous articles and book chapters published in the US, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Italy, Japan, and Canada.
An online seminar series, focused on East/Central Europe within the international and transnational academic and cultural context.
In an age when walls are being rebuilt — physically, politically, and epistemically — transnationalism is no longer just a buzzword. It has re-emerged as one of the most pressing cultural and intellectual questions of our time. Brexit, Trump’s return, and the steady rise of nationalist and illiberal movements across Europe and beyond have shaken the very idea of cross-border solidarities. Yet these new nationalisms are themselves transnational phenomena: they feed on circulating narratives, shared symbols, and contagious affects that move across borders and media.
Our seminar series, Reclaiming Transnationalism, revisits the concept as both an analytical framework and a socio-cultural phenomenon. Rather than seeking a comprehensive account of neo-nationalisms, we focus on concrete lines of inquiry: transnational comparisons, cultural and literary production across genres and media, and the symbolic geographies of contested borderlands such as the Donbas or Upper Silesia. We explore how transnationalism emerges in video games, literature, film studies,memory practices, and intellectual life — as method, as critique, and as lived cultural reality.
By centering East-Central and Eastern Europe, we test the promise and limits of transnationalism in regions marked by shifting borders, imperial legacies, migration, and conflict. Together, our speakers will ask: not only what transnationalism is, but what it does.
Zoom link for the seminars (valid for all sessions): LINK
- 16 Oct — Ilya Gerasimov (Chicago): ‘The Postnational Constellation’ 27 Years Later
- 20 Nov — Andrii Portnov (Sofia): How to Write a Transnational History of Ukraine
- 27 Nov — Imme Klages (Mainz): Transnational Film History: The Digital Platform Filmexil.de and the Günter Peter Straschek Archive
- 11 Dec — Víctor Navarro-Remesal (Mataró): Regionality, History, and Game Studies
- 15 Jan — Gisèle Sapiro (Paris): What Does Transnationalism Mean? Some Reflections through the Sociology of Intellectuals and of Culture
- 22 Jan — Jasmina Lukić (Vienna): Transnational Turn in Literary Studies
- 29 Jan — Eneken Laanes (Tallinn): Memory and Environment
This seminar series is jointly organised by Natalya Bekhta (Tampere), Stanisław Krawczyk (Wrocław), Jana-Katharina Mende (Halle), Denys Shatalov (Kryvyi Rih/Berlin) and Oleksandr Zabirko (Regensburg) within the framework of the research network “Young Network TransEurope ” based at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Contact: Natalya Bekhta