We are proud to announce that on June 3, 2024 at 12.00, Johannes Bent will defend his doctoral thesis: “Ernst Troeltsch and Eastern Europe: Interwar Interpretations and Applications of a German Philosopher of History”.

Public defence will take place in Tallinn University hall M648. The wider audience can follow the defence and ask questions from the degree applicant in Zoom.

Supervisors are Professor Liisi Keedus from Tallinn University and Professor Emeritus Gangolf Hübinger from European University Viadrina.
Opponents are Professor Balázs Trencsényi from Central European University Budapest and Professor Matthias Schloßberger from European University Viadrina.

The doctoral thesis is available in Tallinn University Digital Library ETERA.

The 5th Conference of the International Network for Theory of History will take place in Lisbon at the end of May. This year’s topic is ‘History & Responsibility. Doing History in Times of Conflicting Political Demands’.

On 23 May, Liisi Keedus will give a talk ‘Can we make a new time? A perspective from intellectual history’, and Juhan Hellerma will present on 24 May on ‘Historical responsibility and the question of presentism’.

The inaugural Estonian Annual Conference of Humanities took place at Tallinn University on 10–12 April 2024. Liisi Keedus’s keynote focussed on the Anthropocene and multiple temporalities from the perspective of intellectual history. The full recording is available at Novaator (in Estonian).

In January 2024, our team member Tommaso Giordani taught at the second Invisible University for Ukraine Winter School in Budapest. Dr Giordani mentored students and delivered a lecture on different temporalities of revolution. BETWEEN THE TIMES stands in solidarity with the Ukranian people and condemns the brutal and unprovoked Russian aggression.

At the annual Historical Fictions Research Conference that took place at the University of Malmö on 23–24 February 2024, Ksenia Shmydkaya gave a paper entitled “French Revolution à la Polonaise: Adapting The Danton Case.”

Annual conference of the University of Tartu Museum will take place on 6th of December 2023. This year’s topic is the role of scientific collections in education, research, and society at large. Our research fellow Juhan Hellerma will present the paper on the meaning and presence of the objects from the past (“Minevikuasjade tähendus ja kohalolu”).
Additional information about the conference and its programme are available at the Museum’s website (in Estonian).

“Between the Times” project hosted an international workshop “Time and History in Modern European thought: From the Age of Revolutions to the Anthropocene” on 8–9 September 2023.

We thank all invited scholars for these two days of intense discussions.

Lively discussion during the closing session

Ksenia Shmydkaya presented at the annual conference of the International Society for Intellectual History that took place at the University of Edinburgh, on 4–6 September 2023. Her paper was entitled “Lukács’s Ghost: On Crises and the (Ahistorical) Reception of The Historical Novel.”

On 24 August, Juhan Hellerma will be presenting at the Annual Estonian Philosophy Conference. The title of his paper is “Kuidas kujutleda enneolematut homset?” (“How to imagine an unprecedented tomorrow?”).

More information is available at the conference’s page.

Juhan Hellerma will be presenting at the 15th Conference on Baltic Studies in Europe (CBSE) “Turning Points: Values and Conflicting Futures in the Baltics,” in Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania. His talk “Renegotiating the Value of Presentism” will take place on June 16th.

For more details, please consult the conference’s website.