Sacralization of History in Times of Crises: Modern Eastern Europe

Explores the sacralization of history with a focus on modern Eastern Europe where the erasure of Soviet traditions has triggered a search for specific usable pasts.

Liliya Berezhnaya is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and a Visiting Professor at the Catholic University of Leuven and at the Central European University in Vienna. Till 2021, she was an Associate Professor at the University of Münster’s Religion and Politics Cluster of Excellence in Germany. She earned her MA degree from Moscow State University, and her MA and PhD in history from the Central European University. Her research is focused on comparative borderland studies, imperial and national discourses in Eastern European history, symbolic geography, and the construction of ’the other’, Ukrainian religious and cultural history and eschatological notions in Christian traditions. Her publications include Die Militarisierung der Heiligen in Vormoderne und Moderne (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2020); Iconic Turns: Nation and Religion in Eastern European Cinema Since 1989 (Leiden: Brill 2013; co-edited with Christian Schmitt); Rampart Nations: Bulwark Myths of East European Multiconfessional Societies in the Age of Nationalism (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books 2019; co-edited with Heidi Hein-Kircher); and The World to Come: Ukrainian Images of the Last Judgment (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press 2015; co-authored with John-Paul Himka). ORCID: 0000-0003-1604-2566 Heidi Hein-Kircher is director of the Martin Opitz Library (Herne) and professor at Ruhr-University Bochum. She earned her M.A. and PhD from Heinrich Heine-University in Düsseldorf in 2000 and worked on the research staff of the Herder-Institute for Historical Research in East Central Europe - Member of the Leibniz-Association in Marburg, Germany between 2003 and 2024, since 2009 as the head of department ＂Academic Forum＂. In 2018, she received her habilitation degree at Philipps-University Marburg. In her research, she focuses on urban history (emerging cities), on memory studies, historical critical security, and conflict studies, and on modernity, family values and gender history in Eastern Europe. Selected Publications: Lembergs ’polnischen Charakter sichern. Kommunalpolitik in einer multiethnischen Stadt der Habsburgermonarchie 1861/62-1914 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2020), Consumption and Advertising in Eastern Europe and Russian in the Twentieth Century, ed. with Magdalena Eriksroed-Burger and Julia Malitska (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023); Rampart Nations. Bulwark Myths of East European Multiconfessional Societies in the Age of Nationalism, ed. with Liliya Berezhnaya (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books 2019). ORCID: 0000-0003-3455-5410.