The Hungarian Historical Review invites submissions for its Autumn 2014 issue, the theme of
which will be “Identity, Loyalty, State: The Balkans in and after the Ottoman Empire”

The deadline for the submission of abstracts: December 15, 2013.

As a complex phenomenon, identity has many levels and can appear in various forms, influencing the behaviour of communities or the personalities of individuals, from peasants to intellectuals. Identity can affect the attitudes of a community towards central power and official ideologies, and conversely, elements of identity can be strengthened or oppressed by the mutual interaction between central power and its subjects. The adopted personal-level and community-level strategies, conformist and non-conformist behavioural types can determine the welfare of the community or the career of individuals by emphasizing dominant features and suppressing latent elements of identity.
This is all true of the Balkans as well. The religiously, linguistically, and culturally diverse region, which has at varying times been integrated into various empires, offers a wide range for the study of strategies for the emergence and survival of patterns of identity. As a Moslim Grand Vizier, Mehmed Sokollu (Sokolovic) was able to strengthen the position of Orthodox communities by appointing his relative to metropolite. Can the Köprülü family, which was Albanian of origin, be said to have done something useful for their modest homeland? To what extent can religious, regional or national identities influence the behaviour of certain individuals, furthering or hindering their careers? Do personal interests coincide with the interests of communities? Can imperial laws and norms overwrite local customs and traditions? Was the Islamization of the Balkans forceful? Was it a strategy of the central power in order to control key areas, or was it a strategy of peasants to ensure their own wellbeing? Where does loyalty to local communities end and loyalty to the state begin: are different levels of loyalty reconcilable? How did a Moslem Albanian relate to the Ottoman Emipre after the birth of the modern Albanian nation? What was the attitude of a Moslem Bosniak or Croat towards Austria-Hungary? What microsocial and macrosocial survival strategies were adopted at individual and community levels at the time of the birth of the modern nations, when taking sides with one of the national movements was coupled with growing coercion and violence from the other side and seen as a provocative act? Was it possible to remain neutral in the fight for souls and at what cost? What were the elements of the ethnicization process, how did the Church substitute the millet-system? How did the ethnicization of religious identity take place, and how was the disintegration of religious identity related to the rise of many nations? How can a multi-religional folk divided into tribes be integrated into an ethnic-linguistic nation?

We invite multi-disciplinary or interdisciplinary proposals addressing these questions, such as papers using comparative approaches either in space or time (17th-20th centuries). Analytic examinations of specific questions and syntheses of general phenomena are also welcomed. Papers should focus on the complexity of identity and loyalty and the problems or advantages it may have caused, the relationship between central power and individuals/communities, and the different levels of responses to the challenges. Research focusing on individual examples and statistic-prosopographic analyses are both encouraged.

We provide proofreading for contributors who are not native speakers of English.

Please send an abstract of no more than 500 words and a short biographical sketch, together with a brief biography and selected list of three publications (we do not accept CVs).
The editors will ask the authors of selected papers (max. 10 000 words) to submit their final articles no later than May 15, 2014.
All articles must conform to our submission guidelines:
http://hunghist.org/index.php/forauthors
The deadline for the submission of abstracts: December 15, 2013.
Proposals should be submitted to the organizers by email:
hunghist@btk.mta.hu

The Hungarian Historical Review is a peer-reviewed international journal of the social sciences and humanities the geographical focus of which is Hungary and East Central Europe.

For additional information, including submission guidelines, please visit the journal’s website: http://www.hunghist.org

The Hungarian Historical Review
Published quarterly by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Research Centre for the Humanities
Institute of History
30 Országház utca, Budapest H – 1014, Hungary
Email: hunghist@btk.mta.hu
Website: www.hunghist.org