Short abstract:

From the 1860s, alpinists, travellers, ethnographers, medics, and other Europeans moved around the Carpathians. Over the next half century until the interwar period, their activity caused considerable infrastructural change while generating writing, documentation, reports, visual material, correspondence, and other traces in the Carpathians. Focusing primarily on the southern Carpathians, the region became a stage for a new European bourgeoisie reflecting on and doing what it meant to be modern and European.

Short bio:

James Koranyi is an Associate Professor in Modern Cultural European History at Durham University. He is a cultural historian of east-central Europe and his work covers the German minorities of east-central Europe, memory cultures, and travel writing in the Carpathians. He is co-editor of European History Quarterly. His book, Migrating Memories: Romanian Germans in Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press) charts the story of German speakers in Romania in modern Europe. He has recently published on travel guides (Koranyi, James (2021). ‘Travel Guides’. In Doing Spatial History. Bavaj, Riccardo, Lawson, Konrad & Struck, Bernhard Routledge. 56-72), on travel writing on the Carpathians (Koranyi, James (2021). Gendered Escapes: British Travellers in the Carpathians, 1890s-1920s. Spieglungen 21(1): 21-34.), and has co-edited a book with Emily Hanscam entitled Digging Politics: The Ancient Past and the Political Present in East-Central Europe (DeGruyter, 2022). Other work includes a co-authored book on Modern Europe: A Transnational History (Bloomsbury, forthcoming) and an Arena in the Journal of Global History (forthcoming) on east-central Europe and global history. He will speak on a current monograph project on ‘New Europeans’ in the Carpathians, 1870s to 1920s.

*

This event is organized within the research group Environmental Humanities supported by a grant of the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization, CNCS/CCCDI – UEFISCDI, project number PN-IV-P8-8.1-PRE-HE-ORG-2023-0055, within PNCDI IV and hosted by New Europe College.