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The upcoming Workshop Balkan Studies - quo vadis? (to be held by Kakanien revisited, BMWF and IDM) has already been announced here and there. As a preparation for the event we have started the Digital Anthology Balkan Studies.

The questions to be discussed on in this workshop are important, even ardent. Balkan Studies are interdisciplinary by nature, their focus is regulated by political economic interests. The workshop pays attention mainly to Balkan Studies as a historiographical discipline and wants to examine

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. the mandate for the deconstruction of nationalist myths cultured by the regional historiographies by Western Balkan Studies; 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.

Karl Kaser posed these and other questions already in 2007 in a discussion paper on the future of Balkan Studies in Europe. An English version of this paper has been published in the Digital Anthology: The author argues that with respect to the changed global geographies and political and economic interests Balkan Studies should focus on Asia Minor in the future, instead of continuing discussions on the question of geographical separations of the Balkans from Central Eruope. This would also allow for the soon accomplished European integration of the Balkans.

The paper wonderfully works as an introduction to the workshop and perpares the interested reader/visitor for the following presentations.