Introductory description

The module analyses the importance of symbols, history writing and culture for nation building. Students learn how to analyse national operas and folk music, national literature and history paintings. Other important topics are the connections between war and the nation and the experience of common suffering.

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Autumn Term

1. History and the Present: the conflict in Ukraine
2. Nation and Memory
3. Russia's Mission
4. Poland's Misfortune
5. Ukraine's Struggle
   READING WEEK
6. Peasants into ... (Russians, Ukrainians, Poles)
7. Nation and Literature
8. Nation and Art
9. Nation and Music

Spring Term
10. And what about the Jews?
11. The Great War
12. The Russian Civil War
13. The Polish-Ukrainian War
14. War Remembrance
READING WEEK
15. Soviet nationality policy
16. Poland between the wars
17. Bloodlands: Atrocities and mass murder in the Second World War
18. Memory conflicts

Summer Term
19. Post-Memory
20. Russian, Polish and Ukrainian self-images today

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a detailed knowledge of the importance of cultural factors, shared memories and shared forgetting, common suffering and cultural artefacts in nation building through an overview of Polish, Ukrainian and Russian history.
• Communicate ideas and findings, adapting to a range of situations, audiences and degrees of complexity.
• Generate ideas through the analysis of a broad range of primary source material connected with the processes of nation building in Eastern Europe, including visual sources.
• Analyse and evaluate the contributions made by existing scholarship.
• Act with limited supervision and direction within defined guidelines, accepting responsibility for achieving deadlines.

Indicative reading list

• Davies, Norman, Heart of Europe. The Past in Poland’s Present (Oxford, 2001).
• Lieven, Dominic, Empire. The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (London, 2000)
• Smith, Anthony D., Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism (London/New York, 1998).
• Subtelny, Orest, Ukraine: A History (Toronto, 1988) (4th edition: 2009)
• Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism(London, 2nd edn., 1991).
• Armstrong, John, Nations before Nationalism (Chapel Hill, NC, 1982).
• Augustinos, Gerasimos (ed.), The National Idea in Eastern Europe: The Politics of Ethnic and Civic Community (Lexington, 1996).
• Beiner, Ronald (ed.), Theorizing Nationalism (Albany, 1999).
• Bideleux, Robert, and Jeffries, Ian (eds), A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change(London/New York, 1998).
• Billig, Michael, Banal Nationalism (London, 1995).
• Breuilly, John, Nationalism and the State (Chicago, 1985).
• Brubaker, Rogers, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge, 1996).
• Crampton, Richard, Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century and after (London, 1997).
• Deutsch, Karl, Nationalism and Social Communication. An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality (Cambridge, Mass., 1953).
• Eley, Geoff, and Suny, Ronald G. (eds), Becoming National: A Reader (New York/Oxford, 1996).
• Eley, Geoff, ‘Remapping the Nation: War, Revolutionary Upheaval and State Formation in Eastern Europe, 1914-1923’, in Aster, H., and P.J. Potichny (eds) Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective (Edmonton, 1990), pp. 205-246.
• Geary, Patrick J., The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, 2002).
• Gellner, Ernest, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983).
• Hastings, Adrian, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism(Cambridge/New York, 1997).
• Hechter, Michael, Containing Nationalism (Oxford/New York, 2000).
• Hobsbawm Eric J., and Ranger, Terence (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983).
• Hobsbawm, Eric J., Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1990).
• Hroch, Miroslav, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe (Cambridge, 1985).
• Kedouri, Elie, Nationalism (Oxford, 4th edn., 1993).
• K³oszowski, Jerzy et al. (eds), Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine. The Foundations of Historical and Cultural Traditions in East Central Europe. International (Lublin/Rome, 1994).
• Kohn, Hans, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in its Origins and Background (New York, 1948).
• Krapauskas, Virgil, Nationalism and Historiography: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Lithuanian Historicism (Boulder, 2000).
• Okey, Robin, Eastern Europe 1740 – 1980: Feudalism to Communism (London, 2nd edn., 1986).
• Smith, Anthony D., National Identity (Reno/Las Vegas/London, 1991).
• Smith, Anthony D., The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford, 1986).
• Sugar, Peter F. (ed.), Eastern European Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (Lanham, Md., 1995).
• Sugar, Peter F., and Lederer, Ivo John (eds), Nationalism in Eastern Europe (Seattle, 1994).
• Sussex, Ronald, and Eade, J.C. (eds), Culture and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe (Columbus, 1985).
• Todorowa, Maria, ‘Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Communist Legacy in Eastern Europe’, East European Politics and Societies, 7 (1993), pp. 135-54.
• Todorowa, Maria, ‘The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of Eastern European Nationalism’, Slavic Review, 64 (2005), pp. 140-164.
• Wandycz, P.S., The Price of Freedom: A History of East Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present (London, 1992).
• Weber, Eugen, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914(Stanford, 1976).
• Yuval-Davis, Nira, ‘Gender and Nation’, in Wilford, Rick, and Miller, Robert L. (eds), Women, Ethnicity and Nationalism (London/New York, 1998), pp. 23-35.
• Zimmer, Oliver, Nationalism in Europe, 1890-1940 (Houndmills/Basingstoke, 2003).

View reading list on Talis Aspire

Subject specific skills

See learning outcomes.

Transferable skills

See learning outcomes.