Subject: Research Network Premodern East Slavic Europe

Description: Scholarship on the history of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus is skewed towards recent history. The network Premodern East Slavic Europe aims to pool expertise on the premodern period in East European history in order to strengthen and increase the visibility of this area of research.
The goal is to broaden the focus of early modern studies by integrating the history of the region into the transnational (or transimperial) and transcultural history of Eurasia. At the core of this initiative is the question of what significance the epochal changes of the premodern period have for our current understanding of Eastern Europe in the modern world.

The idea of establishing this network arose from the challenges connected with the low level of formal institutional support in German and western European universities for research into this time period and for trans-Eurasian perspectives. Such an academic network promotes scholarly communication and exchange of knowledge and ultimately, we hope, will facilitate the development of new research perspectives and projects on the history of Eastern Europe in the premodern period.