1. Introduction: The Term "Balkan Peninsula" and Conceptualizations of Southeastern Europe as a Specific Region

Introductory lecture, distribution of assignements, questions.

"Balkans before the Balkans" - antiquity, Turkey-in-Europe, old maps and geographical fantasies. The origins of the term "Balkan Peninsula" - Johann August Zeune (1808). The first conceptualizations of Southeastern Europe as a specific region.

Required Reading: None

2. Founding Figures of Balkan Studies Before WWII

The lecture will outline the beginnings and institutionalization of historiography in different countries of Southeastern Europe. It will underline the close links that the Balkan studies in Southeastern Europe proper maintained with the outside world - throughout the 19^th and early 20^th century especially with Central Europe. The contributions of the founding fathers of Balkan studies such as Konstantin Jireček and Nicolae Iorga will be highlighted.

Required Reading

Alex Drace-Francis: The Prehistory of a Neologism: "South-Eastern Europe", In: Balkanologie, vol. III., nr. 2, 1999, http://balkanologie.revues.org/index751.html

Recommended Reading

Nicolae Iorga: Byzance après Byzance, Bucuresti 1935.

http://www.unibuc.ro/CLASSICA/byzance/cuprins.htm

3. Characterology of Balkan Populations

Since the end of the 19^th century until the end of WWII, there have been numerous attempts to describe and classify the geographic distribution, ethnography, mentality and ethnopsychology (national or regional "character") of Balkan populations. Special attention will be devoted to the works of Serbian ethnographer Jovan Cvijić (La péninsule balkanique, 1918) and German slavicist Gerhard Gesemann.

Required Reading

Jovan Cvijić: Zones of Civilization of the Balkan Peninsula, In: Geographical Review, vol. 5, nr. 6 (June 1918), 470-482.

http://www.uloz.to/x2CAhmf/cvijic-zones-of-civilization-pdf

Ulf Brunnbauer, Robert Pichler: Mountains as "lieux de mémoire." Highland Values and Nation-Building in the Balkans, In: Balkanologie, vol 6, 1-2, 2002

http://balkanologie.revues.org/index433.html

Recommended reading

Jovan Cvijić: La péninsule balkanique, Paris 1918.

4. Leften Stavrianos: The Balkans since 1453

The lecture will be devoted to the analysis of the most influential synthesis of Balkan history published in the post-WWII period, The Balkans since 1453 by Leften Stavrianos.

Required Reading

Leften Stavrianos. The Balkans since 1453, New York 1959.

1-14

81-115

http://www.uloz.to/xFmveWt/stavrianos-the-balkans-pdf

5. Traian Stoianovich: Balkan Worlds

The lecture will evolve around the most ambitious post-WWII attempt to conceptualize a specific Balkan civilization, history and society: Traian Stoianovich´s Balkan Worlds, inspired by the French Annales school of historiography.

Required Reading

Traian Stoianovich: Balkan Worlds. The First and Last Europe, Armonk (N.Y) and London: M.E. Sharp, 1994.

Introduction, 1-3

Chapter 2: Biotechnics and Social Biology, 47-68.

Chapter 4: Society, 120-185.

http://www.uloz.to/xiJuSdP/stoianovich-balkan-worlds-pdf

6. Competing Discourses about History I: Contested Interpetations of Controversial Events

Contesting, mutually exclusive interpretations of history represent a recurrent problem as well as topic of Balkan historiographies.

Required Reading

David Bruce MacDonald: Balkan Holocausts? Serbian and Croatian victim-centered propaganda and the war in Yugoslavia, Manchester and New York 2002, 132-182.