The conference will take place in Warsaw at the Faculty of Modern Languages ​​at the University of Warsaw (ul. Dobra 55) on 25-27 September 2024 in a hybrid format with possible online participation.

The vital and complex role of the landed gentry in the political, economic, and cultural history of Europe has been extensively researched, resulting in a wealth of literature. However, the question of how this role has been remembered since the dissolution of the gentry as a social class, and what the implications of this memory and legacy are for contemporary European societies, has only recently been addressed by sociologists, historians, and anthropologists.

The opening hypothesis of the conference is that post-feudal social structures, which were a consequence of the power dynamics between the gentry and peasants, can be examined through a perspective of the longue durée. The existence of landowners as a class was brought to an end by political decisions and revolutionary movements, or gradually transitioned into social and political systems based on more democratic principles. This led to various legacies from the past, modes of remembrance, and finally, legal and economic circumstances. These diverse trajectories serve as a reminder of the East-West dichotomy in Europe, as in Central and Eastern Europe the end of the gentry’s domination came with bloodshed and violence, as part of the making of the ‘Bloodlands’. However, our aim is to go beyond this dichotomy and see whether schemes other than East-West can be employed to understand the diversity of the gentry’s history in Europe.

An illustration of this diversity is also the multitude of terms used to describe the phenomena we discuss and its internal stratification. While they use the term “landed gentry” as the overarching term for the purpose of this call for papers, they acknowledge that in different regional contexts, categories such as petty gentry, nobility, and aristocracy may be more relevant.

Individual and collective memory of the gentry, and in a broader sense, of the post-feudal period with all its complexities, will, however, vary depending not only on how the gentry era concluded, but also on its characteristics in different regions of Central and Eastern Europe. The gentry might have shared the same ethnicity and religion as the subordinate classes, or they could have been of different backgrounds, such as in Eastern Galicia, where Poles owned vast swathes of land populated by ethnic Ukrainians. They could have also belonged to the titular nation of the nation-state, as in interwar Poland, or been ethnically connected to another nation, as was the case with the German gentry in interwar Czechoslovakia. Its social and political standing, as well as its proportion within the general population, could range from significant, as seen in Hungary, to marginal, as observed in Romania. Moreover, the gentry could either be the sole elite in the country or blend, compete with, or even give rise to other influential groups, as exemplified by the Polish intelligentsia. Lastly, the current status of the gentry and its (former) property varies greatly across Europe: from regions where its status was never formally challenged, such as in Great Britain, to countries where extensive (re)privatization laws were enacted after the collapse of communism, like in the Czech Republic and Lithuania, and to the post-Soviet states of Ukraine and Belarus, where the issue of reprivatization was never politicized and remains largely absent from public discourse.

With this complex agenda in mind, they want to approach the topic of this conference from a comparative and contextualised perspective. They wish to pose questions about the memory of the gentry as inscribed in the official narrative, as well as vernacular beliefs, cultural practices, and art. They will have a close look at the approach to the gentry’s material heritage, the role its history and legacy play in maintaining collective identities on the local and national levels, and the complexity of the legal constraints involved. They will be interested in broadening their approach to the dynamics of the social relations between various actors and seeing among them not only the gentry and peasantry, but also Jews in their traditional and less conventional roles, city dwellers as a counter-community, rich bourgeoisie as the competing and/or aspiring class, and intelligentsia with its multifaceted role. Thus, they will include the internal and external perspectives of various memory actors and keepers. Additionally, their key focus will be the material heritage: objects, buildings and spaces as spheres of interference, contested property battlegrounds and non-sites of difficult memories.

The proposed papers might address, but not be limited to the following issues:

THE LONGUE DURÉE OF POST-FEUDAL STRUCTURES
• How did the memory of the gentry, its role and status change over the time? What were the dividing lines or the turning points?  
• What is the group memory dynamics among the descendants of the gentry themselves, among people with peasant origins, and in local village communities where once the gentry resided? 
• What are the main determinants of this memory – how are violence, power relations and class dependencies remembered?
• How can the longue durée of the post-feudal social mechanisms and structures be discovered in the cultural memory, values and elements of the identity of different social groups?
• How are various aspects of the gentry ethos perceived in contemporary social life, art and culture?
• Who endeavours to uphold this ethos as the ethos of their own group – in other words, who currently belongs to the group that regards the gentry’s legacy as its own?

CHANGE  
• How the ways the post-feudal system was dissolved in different countries influenced the memory of the gentry?
• How the categories of guilt, victimhood and historical justice have been employed in the narratives about the end of the gentry’s domination on various levels (local, group, national)?
• How is the violence against the gentry that accompanied its dissolution as a social class – physical, political and symbolic – remembered today?
• In which form, if any, is the past social order reactivated if an estate is bought by a new owner?  How does such new ownership, be it by descendants of a historical gentry family, or by new people,  resonate with the legacy of the past?
• How did the memory and survival strategies of the gentry and aristocracy families form and evolve during the comunnist and post-communist period? 

MATERIAL HERITAGE
• What is the status of the material heritage of the gentry – manors, parks and palaces? To what extent is it considered common heritage – by local communities, by the national community, and by authorities on various levels?
• What does the memoryscape of such places look like? 
• What are the commemorative practices connected with such spaces?
• Does the issue of the post-1989 (re)privatisation influence attitudes towards the gentry’s material heritage?

REGIONAL AND PARTICULAR VS. UNIVERSAL
• What is the specificity of memory related to the gentry in various European countries? Is the East-West division the main important one?
• Is the memory of the aristocracy different from the memory of the lower nobility? How does the social and political diversification of the gentry in the past influence its memory today?
• Which historical factors influence the collective and individual memory, as well as memorial practices? 
• Is the overlapping of class, ethnicity and religion in the past decisive for the contemporary memory of the gentry and post-feudality?
• Is there any specific memory of the Jewish landed gentry?
• Can any parallels be found outside Europe? What is the postcolonial aspect of the gentry’s historical presence in these countries? 

They welcome submissions from memory studies, heritage studies, and other related disciplines. The comparative approach will be particularly welcome. 

Organisational information
The conference will take place in Warsaw on 25-27 September 2024 in a hybrid format with possible online participation.
The conference language is English. The organisers provide accommodation for the participants. There is no conference fee.