Legacies of Empires: Power and Diversity in Rome, Vienna, and Budapest

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The goal of this program is to show how this world of nation states, which we consider as obvious and relatively stable, is a very recent and fragile historical phenomenon. For many centuries, vast empires comprising diverse peoples ruled and determined their lives and their destinies. What is a nation? Is the European Union simply the stitched together scraps of failed empires? Many of the ideas, ideals, ideologies and policies of the Roman, Byzantine, Hapsburg, and Ottoman Empires are still relevant and often essential in order to understand the often contradictory and unresolved issues of today's world.

Rome, as the capital of the Roman Empire and later the center of Western Christianity, provides an unparalleled location to study the crisis and fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity as a new world religion and its role in shaping the culture, art, and literature of the West.

Vienna, the former Imperial Habsburg capital, is the capital of Austria, and one the most culturally rich and fascinating cities of the world: its complex and intricate urban setting, its monuments, museums, and cultural and artistic life are a strong and powerful testimony of its central role in the history of Europe, and of its contemporary central position in the cultural life of the Western world.

Budapest for centuries stood on the fault line of friction and confrontation between the Holy Roman (and later Hapsburg) and the Ottoman Empires and is today the capital of Hungary, a recently formed nation-state with one of the most unique and peculiar languages and cultures of Europe. Hungary struggled for centuries to preserve and maintain its ethnic and cultural identity.

In what ways might that struggle connect with the rise of the far right and authoritarianism in Hungary? It is a fascinating location to carry out the study of the clash between imperial systems and the theme of the quest for national identity. In each of these locations, the program will be integrated with a course centering the history and culture of Roma people in Europe (pejoratively known as Gypsies) to learn about their heritage and understand why Europe's largest minority continues to face marginalization and discrimination in the extreme. This program examines the ongoing legacies of colonialism and imperialism in Europe and the contemporary world. How are the frameworks we use to understand racialized, excluded, and marginalized people born from those legacies? How are the legacies of colonization perpetuating inequality today? Can we navigate such inequity without perpetuating it ourselves? As we travel across Europe together, we will unpack these questions in a seminar-style, non-shaming learning community.  Join us!