Postage Stamps completed (first round)

2700 postage stamps have been entered into the SPIN/ERNiE database to demonstrate the international proliferation of banal nationalism in the twentieth century. The stamps were selected for commemorating a personality also commemorated by a monument or on a banknote. The geographic visualization of the dataset shows how the iconography of these (European) figures proliferated far and wide across the world. The network visualization shows how the national canons of the various countries are tied together by certain transnational icons (Leonardo da Vinci, Marx, Charlemagne, Schiller) and by small countries with a large philatelic industry (Vatican, San Marino, Monaco). When tracing developments across time with the aid of the time-slide one can register how the coalescence of memory figures into national philatelic pantheons went hand in hand with the reticulation of these pantheons into a transnational network. The GDR played an important role as a conduit between German culture and the Communist world. The process starts c. 1925. 

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Schlegel letters visualized

Stefan

Our colleagues in Germany who have prepared a fine online edition of the correspondence of A.W. Schlegel — august-wilhelm-schlegel.de — have kindly allowed us acccess to the metadata of this corpus (5300 letters). Stefan Poland has ingested these into the ERNiE interface and the ERNiE network visualization is now online. A geographical visualization can be found at https://ernie.uva.nl/viewer.p/21/59/scenario/75/geo/ and a social visualization can be found at https://ernie.uva.nl/viewer.p/21/59/scenario/188/soc/ .

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Bibliography of Romantic Nationalism now online

A searchable Bibliography of Romantic Nationalism has come online on the ERNiE website (ernie.uva.nl). At present it contains 4700 titles; we shall be expanding it further in the months ahead. Like ERNiE itself, the bibliography is in the form of an online database. It is searchable by cultural community and/or by cultural current, or browsable by keyword, allowing users to filter for specific subsets that are useful for their research interests.
Clicking a title in the bibliographical list brings up a publication’s full data in formatted form, and allows you to identify (under the "references" tab) to which ERNiE article(s) this publication is linked.
The Bibliography also includes two newly added features:

  • a sorting button allows you to sort the search results list according to your preferences (using author, year, cultural current and/or cultural community as primary, secondary etc.sorting criteria)
  • a download button will export the search results in .ODT format - a formatted text file format which can be openend in all current word processing software on all operating systems.
  • Full instructions are in the ERNiE Users’ Manual on this site.

We have given the Bibliography its own URL, which we hope the research community will find useful: http://biblio.ernie.uva.nl
We are grateful for suggestions for completing the bibliography’s coverage. Please use the feedback form on this site.

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CfP conference "Religious Dimensions of Nationalism", Venice, November 2020

SPIN will co-organize a conference on “Religious Dimensions of Nationalism: Interdisciplinary Perspectives”, to be held 26-28 November 2020 in Venice at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini. Nationalism and religion are deeply entangled, not only in the crossover field of “political / secular religion” but by way of charismatic leadership, prophetism, messianism, millennialism, and more generally mysticism, esotericism and alternative spirituality. The concept of a divine covenant with a “chosen people” takes new shapes in nationalist, but also imperialist and colonialist, discourses. And the global spread of nationalism, and its role in the decolonization process, is often far from merely secular; indeed alliances with religious fundamentalism are now a prominent feature.
The conference aims at bringing together scholars coming from different disciplines who are interested in this entangled relationship. The full Call for Papers is online here.

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