Our Truths: Violence and the Challenge of a Common Humanity скачать в хорошем качестве

Our Truths: Violence and the Challenge of a Common Humanity

Weatherhead Cluster on Identity Politics Seminar February 26, 2025 4:00–5:30pm Speaker: Max Bergholz, Associate Professor of History, Concordia University. Abstract: In and around the small town of Glina during 1941, Croatian fascists murdered more than 2,000 Serbs. Some they killed inside the town’s Serbian Orthodox Church, which they later demolished. Today, on this space stands a building with two large words written on it: “Croatian House.” If we were to visit Glina today, we would learn nothing about the violence of 1941. Why? This question is the departure point for this talk’s objective to uncover the history of remembering and silencing Glina’s violent past from 1941 until the present day. This local story will expose more broadly how deeply-divided memory activists can nonetheless remember the violent past in strikingly similar ways. Bio: Dr. Bergholz is Associate Professor of History at Concordia University, where he has taught since 2011. He received his PhD in Balkan and East European history at the University of Toronto in 2010. His interests include microhistorical approaches to the history of modern Europe, with a particular focus on the local dynamics of nationalism, intercommunal violence, and historical memory. His fieldwork focuses on Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia, where he researches in central and provincial archives and conducts oral history interviews in small towns and villages. His first book, Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community (Cornell University Press, 2016), investigates the causes and dynamics of violence during 1941 in a multi-ethnic community that straddles the present-day border between Bosnia and Croatia, and their effects on local identities and social relations. The book has won five prizes, including the 2019 Laura Shannon Prize (awarded by the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame) and the 2017 Herbert Baxter Adams Prize (awarded by the American Historical Association). A Bosnian edition of the book was published in 2018 by Buybook (Sarajevo/Zagreb), and was named as a “2019 Book of the Year” in Croatia by the daily newspaper Jutarnji list. A second edition was published in 2024. A Chinese edition was published in 2023 by Imaginist (Beijing). He is currently researching and writing a book entitled Deafening Silences: Intercommunal Violence and the Challenge of Telling Human and Inhuman Histories, which investigates how three distinct governments and their local supporters in the Croatian town of Glina attempted – between 1945 and the present day – to confront the memory of that town’s violent past during 1941.