The ERC research program AGRELITA is a transdisciplinary research program: literature, art history, political, cultural and social history, memory studies, European studies. It focuses on different modes of reception of Greek antiquity in the premodern era (1320-1550) and analyses how the creation of memories of ancient Greece in textual and visual cultures was exploited to support the formation of political and cultural identities at several levels (local, regional, (pre)national, transnational and European ones) in Western Europe from the 1320s to the 1550s.

This September 2023 conference’s ambition is to broaden the reflection on these issues of the uses of the same recomposed/reinvented past to form political and cultural identities at several levels, by opening it :

• to other pasts (ancient, medieval, or modern ones);
• to a wider period of reception and exploitation of these pasts, from the 14th Century to the 1980s, and throughout Europe.

In other words, this conference aims to explore how, at the same period or at different periods, the same past is reinterpreted or even reinvented and may be used to form several political identities : the same past may be instrumentalized to strengthen the identity of a particular political entity, to federate the elements that make it up, to enforce it against other competing political powers, as well as to unite several political entities, to create shared memories, supranational and particularly European ones.

AGRELITA welcomes proposals from various displinary fields (literature, history, art history, archaeology, geography, philosophy, sociology, political science, anthropology, memory studies, European studies) and from various periods across the whole European geographical area. Applying multi-disciplinary approaches and crossed analysis, perspectives and concepts, AGRELITA means to offer new insight into this question.

They invite submissions of papers that address any of the following questions :

• Dynamics of elaboration of plural memories of the same past and their links with the formation of several political and cultural identities;
• The interactions between local, regional, (pre)national, and transnational identities as they assert through convergent or differentiated exploitations of the same past.
• The historical periods, events, intellectual movements, figures, and places that have given rise to differentiated or convergent appropriations by two or more political and cultural communities.

They are interested in essays that focus on the plurality of memorial uses of the same past through two or more case studies, to analyze how the recomposed memories of the same past make it possible to invent, reinterpret and reinforce one or more particular identities, and/or to create a transnational and particularly European memory.

Timeline and Procedure

A short abstract (title and around ten lines of presentation) should be sent to catherine.bougassas@univ-lille.fr and erc-agrelita@univ-lille.fr before September 15th, 2022.

The international symposium will take place on September 14th and 15th, 2023, and travel and accommodation costs will be covered according to the terms of the University of Lille.

Papers selected will be published by February 15th, 2024.

Futher information is available in the pdf below: