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Category: Conversations

Conversations are written or recorded interchanges on common questions by two or more participants who know each other’s work, but may not share the same position, disciplinary or regional perspective. For more information see Contributions.

Four people sit on a panel and stage, facing the audience, deep in discussion.

Conversations / MECAM

Multilinguality in Academic Research and Publishing

Scholars working with and on the world regions in the Global South face a dilemma of doing fieldwork and researching in local languages and then publishing results in international outlets dominated by the English language. In this conversation based on the roundtable, we reflect on this tension navigating the requirements of academic publishing and career-related issues, and regional and local academic traditions in Southeast and West Asia as well as the African continent.

Three people seated on a stage with a large screen behind them showing a fourth person participating remotely.

Conversations / Prisma Ukraïna / Rethinking East European Studies in Times of Upheaval

What Could War Monuments Be Silent About? – A Conversation with Misсha Gabowitsch and Mykola Homanyuk

Olha Haidamachuk in Conversation with Misсha Gabowitsch and Mykola Homanyuk. Conflicts of interpretation and the semiotic contradictions of the war monumentscapes in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories were recently explored by Misсha Gabowitsch and Mykola Homanyuk. In their book Monuments and Territory[1], focusing on memory study, they also raise issues of political and symbolic borders and, therefore, offer rich empirical and analytical materials for rethinking аpproaches to border study.

Newspaper front page with a headline in Spanish about an attack on the Israeli embassy.

Conversations / EUME

Who Owns a Story? Palestinian Memory, Family Archives, and the Ethics of Witnessing

Nada El-Kouny in conversation with Hadeel Assali. In 1969, Golda Meir’s government drew up a secret plan to move up to 60,000 Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip and resettle them in Alfredo Stroessner’s Paraguay. Only a handful made the journey before the scheme was exposed. One of them was Mahmoud, a nineteen-year-old who boarded a plane believing he was bound for work and a future in Brazil, and who realized only later that the promise was a lie. Decades on, his great-niece, the anthropologist Hadeel Assali, has spent years documenting his story and those of the other transferees. Palestinians in Paraguay, a four-part investigative documentary series, for Uncovering Roots co-produced by Max Saakyan, Nada El-Kouny and Nadeen Shaker tells this story.

A group of people in front of a bridge built out of stone.

Conversations / MECAM

Dancing Across Time and Space: Mysticism, the City, and the Body in Tunisia

Souad Matoussi in conversation with Julius Dihstelhoff. Mystical dances in Tunisia are not relics of a distant past. They are living practices that continue to shape urban life today. Moving from sacred zawiyas to private homes and public stages, they connect bodies, memories, and the city across time. This interview with Souad Matoussi shows how these practices function as cultural resources, sites of negotiation, and forms of collective imagination. Mysticism is not outside modern urban life. It is one of the ways cities are continuously produced and reimagined.

Group of people sitting on patterned cushions and rugs in a room watching a black-and-white video projected on a wall.

Conversations

What We Are Trying to Return Is Stories’

Alia Mossallam and Britta Lange in Conversation with Olga Schubert. Both Mossallam and Lange have done extensive research on two sound archives: the Berlin Sound Archive at Humboldt University Berlin (Lautarchiv) and the Berlin Phonogram Archive at the Ethnological Museum Berlin, which is now part of the Humboldt Forum. Both of these archives hold recordings of prisoners of war who were held captive by the Germans during the First World War.

Two people seated on stage in front of an audience during a book launch event with a projected slide showing the book cover.

Conversations / EUTIM

Omeljan Pritsak and the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University – a Conversation with Andrii Portnov

Andrii Portnov is an historian and Professor at the Pilecki-Institute in Warsaw. In 2015, he initiated and co-founded a Berlin-Brandenburg Ukraine Initiative (BBUI), which in 2016 became the PRISMA UKRAЇNA Research Network Eastern Europe at the Forum Transregionale Studien Berlin. In 2023, he was elected full professor at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Ukrainian Free University. His most recent book publication is: “Omeljan Pritsak and the Intellectual Origins of the Ukrainian ‘Harvard Miracle’” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2026).

Cover of the book "Unter deutscher Besatzung".

Conversations

Occupation was a Poison Effective within European Societies – An Interview with Tatjana Tönsmeyer on Everyday Life under German Occupation in WWII

Tatjana Tönsmeyer is a Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Wuppertal. She is one of the most prominent scholars on the history of the Second World War and of occupation in Europe during that period. She also works on the history of memory and the post-history of National Socialism, as well as on questions concerning statehood, supply, and security. She is particularly committed to developing an integrated history of Western and Eastern Europe in their transatlantic relations.

Part of the book cover.

Conversations / EUME / Reviews

Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War – A Conversation with Amir Moosavi

Amir Moosavi in conversation with Anne-Marie McManus. In his book “Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War”, Moosavi explores the massive literary output of the Iran-Iraq War, choosing a comparative approach: In contrasting Iranian and Iraqi writers, it shows the common experiences of war and writing under authoritarian regimes as well as the writers’ various entanglements with this war that overlapped and diverged over time.

Conversations / MECAM

The Hour of Absinthe: A Cultural History of France’s Most Notorious Drink – A Conversation with Nina Studer

Diana Abbani in Conversation with Nina Studer. In her book “The Hour of Absinthe: A Cultural History of France’s Most Notorious Drink”, Studer explores the history of absinthe through the lenses of cultural, social, and colonial history. She uses absinthe as a lens which allows to look at racial inequalities, gender inequalities, class inequalities and more. She is led by the question how a consumption shared between various groups – men, women and children, bourgeoisie, artists and working classes, colonizers and colonized – could be viewed and interpreted as having vastly different consequences, depending on both a person’s belonging to one of these groups and to behaviors associated to these groups.

Conversations / MECAM

Reclaiming Movement: Hayet Amamou on the Maghreb’s Mobile Past and Future

Hayet Amamou in Conversation with Julius Dihstelhoff. Prof. Amamou argues that precolonial patterns of mobility—not rigid territoriality—forged the Maghreb’s identity. Her work challenges modern narratives of exclusion, insisting that historical connectivity, not isolation, holds the key to reimagining the region’s future. Amamou’s work aligns with MECAM’s mission to “imagine futures” by confronting historical erasures. Her keynote underscored that the Maghreb’s precolonial mobility was “a negotiated order, not chaos”—one that offers alternatives to today’s exclusionary policies.