Jan Surman has participated in academic events in Frankfurt and Budapest

IGITI Research Fellow Jan Surman took part in a conference “Problems of Scientific Freedom in Modern and Contemporary History” in Frankfurt (November 2-3), “Academic Freedom in Historical Perspective – Anniversary Conference of the European Review of History” in Budapest (8-10 November), and a series of public lectures on recent research in Habsburg history at CEU, Budapest.  

In the last two weeks IGITI researcher Jan Surman participated in two events concerned with freedom of science and academia. In Frankfurt, at the conference “Problems of Scientific Freedom in Modern and Contemporary History” Jan gave a talk entitled “Becoming (a)political: (Im-)Possibilities of Freedom of Scholarship in an Authoritarian State”, reflecting over the (im)possibilities of academic and intellectual engagement in current times and forms of auto-censorship within German and Russian academia. In Budapest, at the conference “Academic Freedom in Historical Perspective – Anniversary Conference of the European Review of History” he presented glimpses from his ongoing research project about Soviet Ukraine in a talk “Soviet Ukrainian science in the 1920s: “freedom” of science before the time of extremes.”

And just in between, Jan returned to the old topics and gave an overview over the historiography of imperial sciences in CEU public lecture series showcasing recent research in Habsburg history, discussing also how the Habsburg Empire university history can help us understand some processes in the current academia (“family university”, glass ceiling for female scholars, etc.)