Call for Papers - Church and Clergy as a Social Group in Eighteenth- to Early Twentieth-Century Russia: Key Concepts and Models

Conference venue: Moscow, Russian Federation
Period: April 18, 2014
Deadline for submitting abstracts: November 30, 2013
Deadline for submitting full papers: March 1, 2014

The workshop "Church and Clergy as a Social Group in Eighteenth- to Early Twentieth-Century Russia: Key Concepts and Models" will take place at the German Historical Institute in Moscow in connection with the research project “Semantics of the Social.”

The phenomenon of human society remains central for the historical sciences, but research approaches to this phenomenon have been changing fundamentally and now include the study of communities that emerged on the basis of various forms of communication (“public sphere”, “civil society”, “sociability” etc.). Language used in communication and semantic reference points determine individual identities and, at the same time, affect society as a whole. In our case, this concerns the social sphere of Imperial Russia, marked by hitherto unprecedented dynamics and by the creation of a new concept of society / obščestvo, a concept that is essentially still in use in Russia.

We invite scholars to examine these questions within the framework of historical semantics. Historical semantics unites different approaches: historical-lexical semantics, analysis of political language, conceptual history and discourse studies. The production of meaning in the past is examined both through language/text and through images, rituals and emotions. The analysis of semantic changes usually demands a comparative analysis of different historical epochs and cultural-linguistic milieus. Such analyses will be very welcome at our forthcoming workshop.

Research on the semantics of social groups in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia allows us to understand which concepts were central for the emergence of different notions of “we”; at which points in the past we can detect (dis)continuities; which periods – from the perspective of the development of these languages – can be considered times of radical change; and whether these periods were the same for different types of social groups.

At the seminar we intend to discuss these issues at the example of the church and the clergy in Russia. Possible questions for discussion include:

Possible sources for analysis include documents that reflect internal communication within the church and the clergy, such as correspondence, autobiographies, administrative documents and church-related periodicals, but also sources that were addressed to an external audience (epistles, sermons, admonitions etc.).
We welcome both synthetic works and case studies. We are also open for other topics that fall within the general thematic framework of the workshop.

Please submit your lecture proposals to denis.sdvizkov@dhi-moskau.de by 31 November 2013.

Mr. Denis Sdvizkov
German Historical Institute in Moscow
Nachimovskij prospekt 51/21, 117418 Moskau, Russland
tel.: +7 499 7444595
e-mail: denis.sdvizkov@dhi-moskau.de