East European History: The “State of the Field”

What is east European about east European history, and what is historical about east European studies? Some twenty historians from the United States and Canada gathered at the history department at Stanford to discuss the present, past, and, most importantly, the future of the east European field, broadly defined. ¹ The participants presented short papers, designed to reflect their own research as representative of some broader developments within the field. Six were chosen for publication by the editors of EEPS. The exchanges were lively and broad ranging. Four graduate students also presented their perspectives on their training in the field. ²

Even as the possibilities for research have broadened, questions about the definition of the field continue to arise. Since the revolutions of 1989 and the political transformation of Eastern Europe, scholars have been presented with new opportunities in the form of archival access, contacts with east European colleagues, and thematic and polemical challenges. At the same time, the legitimacy of the field has been faced with new intellectual issues, not to mention problems with funding research and teaching positions in universities. The idea of the workshop was to review this landscape of opportunities and challenges and think about ways to improve our scholarship and foster graduate education.

The first day’s sessions were devoted to research. Discussion of papers in the first panel on the geographical and chronological limits of the field led to the realization that many east European historians are already practicing international or transnational history sans le mot. The papers in this session emphasized the importance of placing the region within overlapping settings of the Soviet Union, the history of the German-speaking world, the history of Europe, and the presence of Ottoman and Scandinavian influence. Depending on the time and the set of problems examined by scholars, the history of eastern Europe can range very far indeed from the tradition “heartland” of east-central Europe. There are a host of themes and problems emanating from eastern Europe that are central to international, world, transnational, and global history. At the same time, the history of countries sometimes not traditionally associated with eastern Europe—Austria, Finland, Moldova, and Belarus, as examples—can sometimes be considered central to the understanding of eastern Europe.

More concerns arose when the subject was chronological depth as opposed to geographical breadth. A number of participants expressed the worry that east European historical research has been excessively focused on the modern period in general and the twentieth century in particular. Even at that, there is a tendency to privilege the history of war and violence in twentieth-century studies. There was a general feeling that more emphasis should be placed on continuities from the early modern to the modern and contemporary periods and that graduate student training include extensive reading from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, if not earlier. At the same time, a number of participants urged attention to the post-communist history of the region and even to the history of communism, since scholars in the region themselves have often moved away from studying the post–World War II period.

The remaining panels on research explored subfields that already had somewhat more of a solid foothold in the research agendas of scholars and graduate programs, like gender history, urban history, East European Jewish history, and the history of nationalism, and those that had somewhat less, like the rich intellectual, religious, or economic history of the region. Of course, in every case the relationship between the subfield as practiced in the region itself and in the “West” produces different dynamics, depending on the specifics of communist and post-communist historiography in individual countries. It became clear in discussion that the trajectories of the field have sometimes not tracked the major themes of research in the region itself. Even as all participants emphasized the importance of the fundamental work carried out by east European colleagues, note was taken of underfunded universities and research centers, politicized historical institutes, and individual financial hardships.

The study of gender is a good example of a combination of success and failure. Several papers at the workshop focused on the emergence of gender history as an important and sophisticated focus of the east European field. But the consensus was that there was still a great deal of work to be done in developing the field in American universities, by linking gender with Alltagsgeschichte and integrating it more systematically into graduate programs and the general survey courses in the field. American scholars should also collaborate in a more concerted fashion with East European colleagues, the more so since gender history receives very limited institutional support in the region.

In an atmosphere of excitement about modes of understanding the region that are not limited to nationalism and its critique, many scholars voiced enthusiasm for invigorating the field with the methods of spatial and urban history. In different ways, ports, capital cities, and countrysides offer ways of considering economic and social history in imperial settings. We are also dealing with an area of the world that has its own inherently interesting cultural and historical specificities. While comparisons within the region and with other parts of the world have their legitimate role in the development of scholarly inquiry, the special qualities of the land, peoples, and culture invite in-depth studies of localities, cities, and regions and the particular groups that inhabit them. Historical anthropology and environmental history have much to offer scholars who engage in this kind of inquiry.

The second day of the workshop focused on teaching and the field, with the primary emphasis on graduate training. Four graduate students from different universities led off the day by providing their perspectives on a variety of problems, from the abysmal state of the “job market” to the difficulties they face receiving appropriate language instruction and relevant field-methods courses. All four expressed satisfaction with their programs and enjoyed especially the seminars and reading-groups that brought their cohorts together in field-specific efforts to invite visiting scholars, review their colleagues’ dissertation chapters, and discuss important recent studies.

At the same time, the graduate students thought that the distinctions between “East Europeanists” and “West Europeanists” should disappear, if they have not already, and that they should all be considered as Europeanists, trained in a particular geographical or thematic European subarea. This would respond to (1) the post-1989 realities of eastern Europe, (2) the need for broader methodological and thematic training, and (3) the dynamics of the job market, which emphasizes the broader category of “European history.” Their views on this issue, backed up by an informal graduate student email survey conducted by one of the student presenters, meshed well with the views of the faculty presenters, who talked about a broader European perspective as crucial to the east European field. Indeed, one of the more optimistic conclusions voiced by some participants was that east Europeanists were well prepared for a job market in which employers will expect Europeanists to know more than one language and teach more than one country.

By all indications—an exchange of syllabi, lists of PhD dissertations at representative institutions, lists of articles from EEPS, and lists of ACLS grants in the field—the east European field, however it is defined, remains strong and vital. There are many and diverse courses taught at universities and colleges across the country that reflect the latest trends in the historiography and that impart to students important lessons from the region’s history. Yet as many participants noted, the field continues to rely on government funding for its Title VI centers, which in turn support archival research abroad, language study, MA programs, and visitors from the region. ACLS, NCEEER, the Wilson Center and other funding sources for grants and archival research abroad in our field also depend on the Title VIII grant. There are reasons then to hold together as an East European field and to seek support for the specific needs of those students and faculty who conduct research and teach in it.

One of the major conclusions of the sessions on teaching and the field is that we do far too little sharing of information, collaborative work in our graduate programs, and co-teaching among our neighboring universities and colleges. The example of inviting an outside examiner on a PhD defense was used to illustrate the utility of “joining forces” to improve all-around graduate training in the field. Many participants in the workshop noted at the end that the exchange of views between scholar-teachers in the field about history writing and teaching provided them with a series of insights for their own work and for the classroom.