Part II: Measuring the Balkans or Mission Possible: Dead Reckoning

No, it is not a mistake. The titles of this year's IWM Lectures in Human Sciences alluded to Mission Impossible, the Tom Cruise film series. While it is impossible to perform his physical stunts, the tricky mountainous terrain of the Balkans and their trickier history offer enough vertigo. Still, there is nothing comparable to looking down from a mountain peak in the Balkans. But Gadamer is there, with his defense of humanities, with his thoughts on tradition, prejudice, experience, dialogue, negotiation, reciprocity, situatedness, and the fusion of horizons. In three consecutive lectures, Maria Todorova took stock of her own shifting horizons as she has both experienced and contemplated the Balkans over the course of her life. 

The second lecture – Measuring the Balkans or Mission Possible: Dead Reckoning – seeked to describe the different approaches or measurements that aim to reach this moving object or shifting unit, from specialization to the institutionalization of the discipline as well as the dominant trends that move it. It focuses on the question of the applicability of post- and decoloniality as the most recent additions to Balkan epistemology.

Maria Todorova is a Bulgarian historian specializing in the Balkans. She publishes extensively on Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Communism. Imagining the Balkans (1997) is her most influential book. Todorova is Edward William & Jane Marr Gutgsell Endowed Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Currently, she is Guest of the Institute at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM Vienna).

Philipp Ther, professor of Central European History at the University of Vienna, moderated the evening.

The video recording of the lecture is available below.