It is with great pleasure that I present to you these six papers, delivered at the IWM’s Junior Visiting Fellows conference on June 8, 2005.
The papers were developed during a six-month fellowship granted to researchers whose areas of expertise are as diverse as the subject matters: The first paper is by Astrid Swenson, a doctoral candidate in History at Cambridge University. In her paper, Swenson, who has long studied the historic preservation movements in 19 th-century France, Germany and Britain, examines how collaboration and competition at the world’s fairs, both domestically and internationally, helped give rise to each nation’s cultural heritage. Next is Emilia Palonen, who recently received her doctorate in Ideology and Discourse Analysis from the University of Essex. In her paper, Palonen looks at the speeches of Gábor Demszky, the mayor of Budapest since 1990. Palonen shows how Demszky invokes the image of 19 th-century Budapest as a way of articulating his political values. Emily Rohrbach, a doctoral candidate in English Literature at Boston University considers Jane Austen as a historiographer. Within Northanger Abbey, long considered one of Austen’s most light-hearted novels, Rohrbach finds a serious critique of the way 18th-century British historians construed the past. The first three papers address ways in which people interpret their society’s history. In this next paper, Asli Baykal, a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at Boston University who conducted fieldwork in Uzbekistan in 2002 and 2003, describes the present breakdown of the Uzbek state’s relations with Uzbek society, a situation that she suggests is likely to deteriorate further in the future. Greg Charak, a doctoral candidate in Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, identifies a very different kind of breakdown: the split between analytic and Continental philosophy that occurred before the Second World War. Charak’s paper outlines some ways in which this split, which he says is accompanied by a disjunction between “the positive” and “the primordial,” can be reconciled.
My own contribution looks at some of the ways in which governments in some European states are using international legal mechanisms to censor expression uttered outside their borders. I recently received a Master’s degree in journalism from Boston University, and I am currently working as an online journalist.
