2014–2015 Linking Northern Communities. East European Immigration into Scotland
This programme, funded by the Scottish Universties Insight Institute at the University of Strathclyde, was led by Professor Karin Friedrich (Aberdeen) and Professor Ulrich Kockel (Heriot Watt). It focused on the importance of understanding the social, cultural and economic parameters of integration of migrants into Scottish society, and how awareness of common links of heritage and its influence on identity can improve and ease the integration of migrants into their new environment.
Find out more: https://www.scottishinsight.ac.uk/Programmes/OpenCall201415/ LinkingNorthernCommunities-EastEuropeanImmigrationinScotland.aspx
Linking Northern Communities socially, culturally and economically: East European Immigration in Scotland, report by Professor Karin Friedrich
Projects
- Federalism and the fate of Europe’s borderlands: the transnational search for alternatives to empire and ethnic nationalism in Eastern Europe, 1880s-1960s.
This project is being conducted by Marcel Garboś, who was awarded £335,000 for a three-year British Academy International Fellowship that commenced on 1 February 2024. It looks at neglected Eastern European federalist movements from across the western and Eurasian borderlands of Russia, whose intellectual centre lay in the lands of the former Polish-Lithuanian Union, which emerged from the 1880s as a laboratory for federalist ideas that sought alternative models to the Russian Empire, and then the Soviet Union. Marcel has a special interest federalist ideas and plans among socialists and communists and shows that there was far more to east-European federalism than Józef Piłsudski’s plans to create a federal version of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Federalist ideas attracted support from a wide range of national groups in the borderlands of the former Russian Empire. His project demonstrates that current debates concerning self-determination, federalism, political union, and internationalism have deeper roots in the classic age of nationalism than is often appreciated
- Entanglements and Disentanglements. Towards a Transnational History of Poland and its neighbours.
This is a collaborative project with the Jagiellonian University, Cracow, and Charles IV University, Prague, funded largely by the Jagiellonian University, with contributions from CPLS, CEMS and Prague. It has held three workshops in Aberdeen (May 2023), Prague (January 2024) and Cracow (June 2024) and is currently preparing a volume for publication, with articles by Robert Frost, Karin Friedrich, Helen Lynch, Marcel Garboś, and Paweł Grabowski. At the last workshop in Cracow, Paweł and Marcel delivered papers on Polish-Burgundian relations and the varieties of Polish federalist thought respectively. In a training day for postgraduates from the Jagiellonian History department, Helen Lynch ran two popular sessions on creative writing, Robert Frost and Karin Friedrich ran sessions on getting published in English and applying for research funding, Paweł Grabowski and Cameron Flint discussed postgraduate life in the UK, and Marcel Garboś led a similar session on the USA.
- Recovering Europe’s Parliamentary Culture, 1500–1720.
Robert Frost and Karin Friedrich have been involved in this collaborative pilot project with the Universities of Oxford and the Jagiellonian University, Cracow, funded by the Jagiellonian University with contributions from CPLS and CEMS. The project compares the Polish-Lithuanian Sejm with the Scottish, Irish, and English parliaments. Both have contributed blogs to the project website, and Robert is lead author on a collaborative chapter on parliaments and political union and has contributed to a further chapter on parliamentary communities. The project has held workshops in Warsaw (May 2023) and Aberdeen (May 2024) and presented chapter drafts at a session of the annual Recovering Forgotten History conference, funded by the Museum of Polish History (Warsaw, June 2024). A volume is being proposed to OUP. Once the pilot project is complete, wider funding will be sought for a project that is extended across early modern Europe: https://intellectualhistory.web.ox.ac.uk/recovering-europes-parliamentary-culture-1500-1700#/
- Ukrainian Global History Initiative
Robert Frost has been awarded £67,500 by the Ukrainian Global History Initiative (UGHI) https://uhgi.org/, to buy out his teaching for the academic year 2024-5. The UGHI is an international charity, registered in the UK, whose aim is to explore Ukraine’s place in global history across the ages in the light of the current war. Although most of the 90 scholars involved in this three-year project are historians, the project is fundamentally interdisciplinary, and will also look at natural history, zoology, paleontology, and archeology in its study of the region and its peoples. Robert is contributing a reassessment of the historical relationship of the Ukrainian lands and their peoples with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland from the Mongol invasions of the mid-thirteenth century until the 1667 Treaty of Andrusovo, the first partition of Ukraine.