Call for Papers – History of Communism in Europe

Deadline for submitting abstracts: June 1, 2014
Deadline for submitting full papers: August 30, 2014

The forthcoming issue of the academic journal History of Communism in Europe is Narratives of Legitimation in Totalitarian Regimes in the 20th Century Europe – Heroes, Villains, Intrigues and Outcomes. Twenty five years ago the grand narrative of European communism collapsed together with the Great Wall of Berlin, leaving in its wake an invitation for questions, analyses and startling revelations. This grand narrative resisted for several decades and a perfume of nostalgia for those times still persists in Central and Eastern Europe. Looking further back in time, countries in this area and in the rest of the European space experienced regimes of the extreme right. Today many of the consequences of both extremes are widely known, but the question of legitimation still lingers. This volume tries to explore the myriads of strings that formed those grand narratives: grass-root ideologized story-telling, construction of important characters and figures, micro and macro-narratives, narrative templates of collective memory, narratives that define and legitimate knowledge and truth, symbolic figures of heroes and villains. Are there specific types of legitimation according to different cultures and cultural influences? We welcome articles that intertwine history, memory, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, critical theory, gender studies, literature or any other related field and are written from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Topics may address the following aspects:

The Academic Journal History of Communism in Europe is edited by The Institute for the Investigation of the Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile. It is a journal open to all inquiries that have the objectivity, complexity and sophistication required by any research on the issue of communism, as well as on the different aspects of totalitarianisms of the 20th Century Europe. These scholarly investigations must remain an interdisciplinary enterprise, in which raw data and refined concepts help us understand the subtle dynamics of any given phenomenon.

Contributors are kindly asked to write abstracts that do not exceed 500 words. Deadline: 1st of June 2014.
You may submit your proposals at:
hce@iiccr.ro
dalia.bathory@gmail.com
Selected authors will be notified by the 20th of June. The deadline for the final draft of the paper is 30th of August 2014.

The Institute for the Investigation of the Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian ExilE
e-mail: dalia.bathory@gmail.com
e-mail: hce@iiccr.ro