Regionalism and its discontents: the case of Eastern(?) East-Central(?) Central(?) Europe, Nora Berend (Cambridge)

Eastern, East-Central, or Central Europe? The name of this historical 
region is hotly contested. Does the region itself even exist? The 
lecture will focus on the alleged medieval roots, when regional 
divergence started. Confronting modern historiography with medieval 
texts, N. Berend will highlight the dangers of forcing history into 
regional straight-jackets.

Nora Berend is Professor of European History at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, UK, and Fellow of St Catharine’s College.Educated in Budapest, Paris, and New York, she held a Junior Research Fellowship at Cambridge, a Humboldt Fellowship at Mannheim, and was an invited Fellow at the K. Hamburger Kolleg Bochum. She was visiting professor at EHESS (Paris), Doshisha (Kyoto), Mannheim and Stockholm, is Professor II at NTNU, Trondheim, Norway, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Stockholm. Her research interests encompass the treatment of religious minorities, religious and cultural interaction, the process of Christianization, the formation of identity, and the creation of historical myths. She is the author of the book  At the Gate of Christendom: Jews, Muslims and ‘pagans’ in medieval Hungary (c.1000 – c. 1300) (2001), for which she received the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone prize and the American Association for the Study of Hungarian History’s Biennial Book Prize. She has also edited numerous books, among them: Medieval Frontiers: concepts and practices (with David Abulafia, 2002), Christianization and the rise of Christian monarchy: Central Europe, Scandinavia and Rus’c. 950 – c. 1200 (2007), The expansion of Central Europe in the Middle Ages (2013), Central Europe in the High Middle Ages, c. 900-c.1300, (co-authored with Przemysław Urbańczyk and Przemysław Wiszewski, 2013).