Gruia Bădescu is a 2024-2025 Paris Institute for Advanced Study Research Fellow and a Research Fellow at the Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, and, before Konstanz, he was a lecturer and research associate at the University of Oxford. His research examines how societies deal with difficult pasts through spatial practices, investigating the relationship between architectural reconfigurations and memory. One focus of his research is urban post-war reconstruction, particularly in the former Yugoslavia and the Middle East. His PhD examined the relationship between the reconstruction of cities after war and the process of coming to terms with the past, with a focus on Belgrade and Sarajevo. In 2015, Gruia joined the University of Oxford as a Departmental Lecturer in Human Geography and later became research associate, working within an AHRC-Labex project on transnational processes of criminalization of dictatorships. His project examined processes of memorialization of sites used for political violence during the military dictatorship in Chile and their transnational dimension, linking them with South-East Europe. In Konstanz, he was first an Alexander von Humboldt fellow, hosted by Jan and Aleida Assmann, and is now leading a research group on cities after political ruptures. He is the co-convener of the Memory, Space and Place working group of the Memory Studies Association.
Supervisors: Wendy Pullan (PhD), Maximilian Sternberg (PhD), and Jan and Aleida Assmann (Humboldt hosts)
Supervisors: Wendy Pullan (PhD), Maximilian Sternberg (PhD), and Jan and Aleida Assmann (Humboldt hosts)
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Papers by Gruia Badescu
century, from the port of Hungary in the Dual Monarchy to a free
city, to D´Annunzio´s Italian Regency of Carnaro, annexation by Italy, incorporation
into Yugoslavia, and eventually the independence of Croatia. The
article examines the processes of urban reconstruction and architectural reconfigurations
in the city as “frontier urbanism”, building on Wendy Pullan’s
(2011) discussion of how various actors employ architectural and place-making
practices to secure the state in contested urban space. The article traces
Rijeka/Fiume´s urban development as a window of fixating state identities
in the built environment throughout the century, focusing on the aftermath
of the Second World War. It examines the urban transformations of the city
as the demographic landscape was reshaped after the departure of the local
Italian-speaking majority and the arrival of workers from various parts of
Yugoslavia, but also from Italy. By analysing decisions to rebuild or not
buildings damaged by war, as well as the demolition of the 1943-built votive
temple in Mlaka, the article inquires how reconstruction and urban planning
became avenues to secure the state at its new frontiers.
memory and post-war reconstruction in Sarajevo and Beirut, History and Anthropology, DOI:
10.1080/02757206.2019.1617708
Abstract:
Beirut and Sarajevo share a long Ottoman past followed by urban expansion under the protectorate of further imperial rule—of the French and Habsburg Empires, respectively, as well as a recent experience of urban warfare, segregation, and post-war reconstruction. This article examines how the architectural heritage of empires in the two cities has been transformed, reimagined and mobilized through urban post-war reconstruction by a number of actors: local authorities and politicians, architects, international organizations and investors. Discussing the tensions between the memory of empire and contemporary nation-building processes, the essay argues that the politics of memory and amnesia surrounding the recent wars shape and reconfigure the memory and heritage of empire. Moreover, it reflects how the reshaping of urban space acts both as an arena and as an enhancer of the politics and practices of memory and amnesia.
century, from the port of Hungary in the Dual Monarchy to a free
city, to D´Annunzio´s Italian Regency of Carnaro, annexation by Italy, incorporation
into Yugoslavia, and eventually the independence of Croatia. The
article examines the processes of urban reconstruction and architectural reconfigurations
in the city as “frontier urbanism”, building on Wendy Pullan’s
(2011) discussion of how various actors employ architectural and place-making
practices to secure the state in contested urban space. The article traces
Rijeka/Fiume´s urban development as a window of fixating state identities
in the built environment throughout the century, focusing on the aftermath
of the Second World War. It examines the urban transformations of the city
as the demographic landscape was reshaped after the departure of the local
Italian-speaking majority and the arrival of workers from various parts of
Yugoslavia, but also from Italy. By analysing decisions to rebuild or not
buildings damaged by war, as well as the demolition of the 1943-built votive
temple in Mlaka, the article inquires how reconstruction and urban planning
became avenues to secure the state at its new frontiers.
memory and post-war reconstruction in Sarajevo and Beirut, History and Anthropology, DOI:
10.1080/02757206.2019.1617708
Abstract:
Beirut and Sarajevo share a long Ottoman past followed by urban expansion under the protectorate of further imperial rule—of the French and Habsburg Empires, respectively, as well as a recent experience of urban warfare, segregation, and post-war reconstruction. This article examines how the architectural heritage of empires in the two cities has been transformed, reimagined and mobilized through urban post-war reconstruction by a number of actors: local authorities and politicians, architects, international organizations and investors. Discussing the tensions between the memory of empire and contemporary nation-building processes, the essay argues that the politics of memory and amnesia surrounding the recent wars shape and reconfigure the memory and heritage of empire. Moreover, it reflects how the reshaping of urban space acts both as an arena and as an enhancer of the politics and practices of memory and amnesia.
“So, when do you plan to change your permanent exhibition?” is the question commonly asked of museum curators, even when their “permanent exhibition” has just been opened to the public. This special issue of MARTOR journal seeks to offer different answers to this question, from diverse corners of the planet, from former Yugoslavia to Senegal, from Bucharest to Rome, diving not only into the “when” but equally into the “why” and “how” museums change.
In 2014/2015 we held 12 seminars at the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge. We were honoured to host truly engaging talks by Marianne Hirsch, Leo Spitzer, Wulf Kansteiner, Paul Connerton, Xun Zhou, Emiliano Perra, Andrew Herscher, and Lea David among others, as well as to organise two screenings of relevant documentaries.
The 2016 conference featured over 60 presenters from 20 countries and had Carlo Ginzburg and Paul Connerton as keynote speakers .
Since the end of the First World War, cities and regions in Europe, particularly in the eastern half of the continent, witnessed frequent changes in borders. Previous research on border change and territorial transfers has focused on the actions of nationalizing regimes after the 1919 Paris conference, as well as the post-1945 transfer of territories in East-Central Europe and ensuing flight, expulsions and repopulation programs (Rieber 2000, Ther and Siljak 2001, Ballinger 2003, Crainz Pupo and Salvatici 2008, Snyder 2010, Ferrara 2011, Thum 2011, Reinisch, and White 2011, Ferrara and Pianciola 2012, Service 2013, Sezneva 2013). Recent research has analysed how states appropriated cities and regions they gained from neighbours (Karch 2018), and, in the case of socialist states, used urban remodelling as an opportunity to showcase socialist modernization projects, as occurred in Lviv, Ukraine (Amar 2015) and in Yugoslavia (Kulić and Mrduljaš 2012, Le Normand 2014). While research on transferred cities and territories has tended to see border changes primarily as ruptures tearing people from their old lives and cutting cities off from their previous national frameworks, this emphasis is called into question by scholarship by geographers and sociologists who comprehend cities not as discrete entities but as nodes within regional, national and global networks. From this perspective, cities are spaces in which flows of different types (goods, labour, capital, information) enter, converge, and exit, connecting these cities with other circuits and points across the globe (Massey 1991, Castells 2002, Harvey 2003).
This conference seeks contributions that showcase research on history, memory, and mapping tools in the context of European border changes in the twentieth century. We are interested in highlighting research on the experience of cities and regions that have undergone border changes in the twentieth century in order to showcase histories of transition, to examine the reshaping of local and regional memory practices, and to explore the variety of research methods that might be used to conceptualize and visualize change.
Keynote speakers:
Dominique Kirchner Reill, Associate Professor, University of Miami, author of Nationalists Who Feared the Nation: Adriatic Multi-Nationalism in Habsburg Dalmatia, Trieste, and Venice (Stanford University Press, 2012.) presenting her new book The Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire.
Anne Kelly Knowles, McBride Professor of History at the University of Maine, editor of Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship (2008) and Geographies of the Holocaust (2014), Guggenheim fellow (2015).
Brendan Karch, Assistant Professor of History at Louisiana State University, author of Nation and Loyalty in a German-Polish Borderland: Upper Silesia, 1848–1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2018)
Olga Sezneva, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam, whose work has examined the connection between the urban built environment and social memory (particularly in the case of Kaliningrad/Königsberg), human mobility, and digital technologies; part of the artistic collective Moving Matters Traveling Workshop.
Organisers: The conference is organized by the Univeristy of Rijeka, Centre for Advanced Studies – South East Europe, with the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada-funded project Rijeka in Flux: Borders and Urban Change after World War II, the Memoryscapes project’s Seasons of Power flagship programme for Rijeka 2020 – European Capital of Culture, and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity Research Group, “Empires of Memory: The Cultural Politics of Historicity in Former Habsburg and Ottoman Cities”.
Conveners: Gruia Badescu, Nelly Bekus, Raluca Grosescu
This conference brings together museum practitioners and academics working in the field of dealing with the past in order to discuss the transnational circulation of ideas, cooperation and tensions between memorialization processes of right wing and left wing dictatorships in Europe. The conference aims to enhance collaboration between academics and practitioners and create dialogue between institutions whose activities are often confined to national borders. This conference is supported by the AHRC “Care for the Future” (UK) and Labex “Les Passés dans Le Présent” (FR) joint funded project The Criminalization of Dictatorial Pasts in Europe and Latin America in Global Perspective.