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In recent years, historical nationalism scholarships has seen an exciting turn towards history from below. Employing concepts such as “everyday nationalism”, “banal nationalism” as well as “everyday ethnicity”, scholars have turned towards methodologies that enable the study of nationalism’s ambiguous reception among “ordinary people”. Within this scholarship, the wider region of Central and Eastern Europe has long figured as “one of the powerhouses of innovative research” (Berecz, 2023, p. 4). Furthermore, due to its diverse and idiosyncratic solutions towards governing cultural and, in extension, national diversity, the Habsburg Empire likewise appears as one of nationalism research’s prime case study areas.To further this budding subfield of research, the present conference aims to explore non-elite encounters with nationhood within the context of the late Habsburg Empire. By approaching the history of nationalism from below, the conference aims to resituate the lived experience of nationhood and study its intersections with various alternative or complementary forms of belonging (gender, class, local/provincial patriotism, etc.). In chronological terms, we limit our inquiry to the seven decades spanning from the 1848 revolutions to empire’s collapse following the Great War in 1918. In line with its bottom-up framing, we are primarily interested in the experiences of “non-elite actors”, i.e., people who are “usually not actively or consciously engaged in concerted, organized nation-building strategies, or who are supposed to play a rather executory role (e.g., lower middle-class bureaucrats) in nationalizing policies designed by others” (Beyen and Ginderachter 2012, 9–10).
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Inštitut za novejšo zgodovino, Privoz 11, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenija, Ljubljana, Slovenia
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