The research project “Regional Translocality in Historical Perspective. The Case of Slavonia and Bosnia", which is being carried out as part of an Alexander von Humboldt Institute partnership (Ruhr University Bochum, Croatian Institute of History – Department in Slavonski Brod, Leipzig University), aims to introduce the perspective of translocality for the interdisciplinary investigation of interaction, mobility and communication of people as well as the exchange of goods and ideas/knowledge between neighboring regions of East-Central and Southeast Europe along Sava and Danube rivers, particularly Slavonia and Bosnia, in history. The project’s focus primarily lies on the historical timespan between the 15th and 20th century, during which Slavonia and Bosnia as well as Southeast Europe and neighboring regions in the Pannonian Basin, in one way or another, dealt with the direct and indirect Ottoman influence.
In close cooperation with the DFG priority program ‘Transottomanica: Eastern European-Ottoman-Persian Mobility Dynamics’, we invite potential conference participants to submit their abstracts that focus particularly on the diverse forms of cross-border mobility that affected the economic and social structures on both sides of the border rivers in East-Central and Southeast Europe. This view of fluvial spaces allows us to look beyond the established area containers and focus on concrete contexts and fields of social interaction with different spatial and social ranges unified by the lens of mobility. The planned conference, which will take place from 24-26 March 2025 at the Ruhr-University Bochum, will focus on rivers in their function as border areas, and thus also raise the question of the extent to which they were able to prevent mobility. This relationship between mobility and immobility and the associated dynamics of entanglement and disentanglement will form a central point of discussion at this workshop. The two research projects are also linked by the endeavor to discuss transregional mobility phenomena from a comparative perspective. Against this background, the conference will compare developments in the Danube-Sava region with similar dynamics in other regions of Eastern-Central and Southeast Europe. The conference will mark the last phase of the Humboldt project “Regional Translocality in Historical Perspective: the Case of Slavonia and Bosnia”. The official language of the conference will be English. The organizers will fund accommodation costs for the authors of accepted abstracts.

Potential participants are kindly asked to send their abstracts by 30 October 2024 to Markus.Koller@ruhr-uni-bochum.de, stefan.rohdewald@uni-leipzig.de or Dino.Mujadzevic@hu-berlin.de

Organizers: Center for Mediterranean Studies, (Ruhr University Bochum), Chair for the History of East- and Southeast Europe (Leipzig University), Department for the History of Slavonia, Srijem and Baranja in Slavonski Brod (Croatian Institute of History), DFG priority program ‘Transottomanica: Eastern European-Ottoman-Persian Mobility Dynamics’