Balkan Studies

Is there a crisis in Balkan Studies? Most recent commentators did not put it as drastically but have still noted a number of problems, among which being: 1) the limited impact of professional history-writing on more popular renderings and understandings of history;  2)  the seeming reluctance of scholars to take up theoretical and methodological innovations and approaches as pioneered and adopted in the historical writing on other regions, as well as in related disciplines in the social sciences and humanities; 3) a sustained conservatism with regard to nation/identity as the principal object of historical study in the region. 4) Balkan Studies in the West's perceived mandate for the deconstruction of nationalist myths cultured by the the regional historiographies; and 5) the question in how far researchers’ self-limitation to a European geography in approaching things Balkan is sound or, to the contrary, precisely a limitation.

The international workshop Balkan Studies – quo vadis? (Vienna; April 25, 2009) will take stock of this debate and put forward new questions for a continued discourse on the state of the discipline as practiced both within and outside the region.