This event brings together Swarthmore’s Pieter Judson (History) and Harvard University’s Alison Frank (History) to address the impact of empire on things like national identity.

Can European empires within Europe be approached with the same conceptual tools as Europeans’ overseas empires? How do post-colonial studies contribute to our understanding of European borderlands in places like Croatia, Galicia or Geoa, which lay at the edge of empires and nation-building projects? How have literary and cultural movements in Eastern and Central Europe reflected and engaged with the imperial power? And, finally, how does the imperial past shed light on the ethnic and political tensions that have roiled Europe since the end of the Soviet era?