Organised by
Robert Rollinger (Innsbruck), Erich Kistler (Innsbruck), Melanie Malzahn (Vienna), Nina Mirnig (Vienna), Bernhard Palme (Vienna), Oliver Jens Schmitt (Vienna), Florian Schwarz (Vienna), Ulrike Tanzer (Innsbruck)
Photo: Shah-i Mashhad, Afghanistan. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 | © Bert Glatzer & Michael J. Casimir
Mon 17 November – Thu 20 November, 2025
Innsbruck, Austria
Ágnes-Heller-Haus (Innrain 52a)
Kaiser-Leopold-Saal der Theologischen Fakultät
(Karl-Rahner-Platz 3, 2nd floor, room 203)
Programme [289 KB; version Apr 10, 2025]
The conference aims at methodologically developing a change of paradigm in a global history of empires on a structural basis. It defines empires as main actors with agency beyond traditional epochs and frontiers. It overcomes a Eurocentric perspective by conceptualizing trans- and intercontinental frameworks of imperial agency. It focuses on structure and creates a new understanding of imperial border areas within a comparative approach. The concept of imperial “borderlands” allows new insights into the various forms of interaction between imperial core areas and the imperial margins, where the latter defines a dynamic zone of its own. It is within this zone where dynamic processes of adaption and adoption, imitation and separation, economic and social entanglement, emancipation and separation, identity-shaping and political agency occur. In particular, such processes of resilience and resistance and their structural settings within imperial margins, so far rather neglected by modern research, will be a main field of research by the initiative.