Call for Papers Workshop “The Aggressor in Museum”

The Ladenburg Research Network “The Aggressor: Self-Perception and External Perception of an Actor Between Nations,” sponsored by the Daimler and Benz Foundation, invites submissions for the Workshop “The Aggressor in Museum.” This workshop, co-organized by Prof. Dr. Alexandra Bounia and Prof. Dr. Ilaria Porciani, will take place at the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle in Thessaloniki on October 9–10, 2025. The workshop will focus on museums as institutions of memory construction through material culture and as institutions of public history. It aims to bring together researchers from different institutions to discuss the representation of controversial historical actors in European museums and temporary exhibitions. The individual actors, and possibly their bilateral and multilateral reception and instrumentalization, will be described, analyzed, and compared in the papers to be presented.

 

The organizers invite papers that explore the following questions:

• How are individual historical or recent aggressors from a foreign nation interpreted today in museums, and how do their images shape notions of the national self and the foreign other?
• What functions do museum representations of aggressors fulfill in the present for political identity and unity, both internally and against the outside world?
• How are aggressors constructed within institutions and beyond? What constitutes them? Which elements are emphasized, which are new, and which are ignored?
• What motivations are attributed to the aggressors, and what motivates resistance against them?
• To what extent do the aggressors and those who oppose them represent collectives, especially nations, with their characteristics?
• To what extent do the chosen narratives fit with those that have emerged in other contexts (e.g., the victim narrative in genocides)?
• How are contemporary special exhibitions different from permanent exhibitions in established museums in their discussion of aggressors and their stories?
• Which (regional) political camps or social groups systematically and successfully (or unsuccessfully) instrumentalize enemy images in museums?
• How have the assessments of aggressors in the country of the perpetrators and in that of the victims converged in the respective institutions?
• What are the political and social conditions for a military hero to be reinterpreted as an aggressor in his own homeland, as is currently happening with actors of colonialism?
• What are the visitor’s reactions to the representation of the aggressor?