Postage stamps are the ultimate form of “banal nationalism”. Spread in great variety and in huge numbers, they imprinted a national brand on all written communication throughout the 20th century. The European corpus of nationally-branded postage stamps is far too huge to admit full coverage within ERNiE, but a selection will be given under the rubric “CURRENCY”. That rubric used to contain only banknotes but now also accommodates postage stamps; the search bar allows users to choose between the two.
The metadata are hyperlinked and clickable, allowing users to explore the connections to different cultural media. As always, the “label” icon above the samples brings up a searchable/sortable checklist.

The interest of postage stamps for SPIN is threefold. [....]

The Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe has been officially launched on 16 May at Central European University, Budapest. A Round Table was held on the topic of Romantic Nationalism as a historical and a contemporary phenomenon and on its transnational analysis, and a first copy was presented to CEU’s Rector, Michael Ignatieff.

Within The Netherlands, a launch event will be held on 4 June at Spui25 in Amsterdam, with José van Dijck (President, Royal Netherlands Academy of Science), Fred Weerman (Dean, Humanities Faculty, University of Amsterdam) and Michael Wintle (Director, Huizinga Institute).

[....]

Edited by Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen, and the fruit of a series of SPIN workshops, the book has appeared in Brill’s European Studies series. One of the first English-langage historical surveys of the transnational, especially German-French entanglements and confrontations over this European geographical and cultural core region, brings together eminent literary and cultural specialists and present materials and analyses from various perspectives – literature, tourism, heritage, geopolitics.

Of all European landscapes and regions, the Rhine is one of the most heavily overlaid with cultural and political meaning. Cradle of Romanticism, tourism, and the picturesque, bone of contention between the German and French spheres of cultural and geopolitical influence, the Rhine has attracted armies, artists, activists and tourists for centuries and has featured prominently the key writings of Europe’s literary and intellectual history from Byron to Lucien Febvre.[....]

Amsterdam, 19-21 September 2018 – Call for Papers

A major international conference on Cultural mobilization: Cultural consciousness-raising and national movements in Europe and the world will be held in Amsterdam between 19 and 22 September 2018. The conference is organized by SPIN in association with NISE (Antwerp) and ASEN (London).
[....]

A conference on sports and identity in Friesland and other countries will be held in Leeuwarden on Friday 7 February. More information here.

In the coming years, SPIN will add a fresh project to its ERNiE strategy: Book Links. It will trace how data from book history can help us map and understand the dynamics of intellectual networks, cultural diffusion and knowledge production in 19th-century history.
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Making use of its trusted Nodegoat technology, SPIN will analyse how book publications function as links in intellectual traffic and in personal networks. This will be done by tracing re-editions (also in re-targeted adaptations, e.g. folklore or mythology for domestic or juvenile reading), translations into other languages, and various forms of textual-visual or textual-performative intermediality. In addition, the use of books as vehicles in networking and knowledge diffusion will be traced by mapping dedications and reviews.

This of course opens up a vast field. SPIN will concentrate, in the coming years, on elaborating proofs of concept in two pilot studies: the 19th-century translations and adaptations of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels and of the Grimms’ Kind- und Hausmärchen, Deutsche Sagen and Deutsche Mythologie.[....]

The online ERNiE portal has passed a various millennial landmarks in the past year. The number of ERNiE articles online now stands at 1200, with an additional 200 currently being processed editorially for imminent online posting. The checklist of nationally-themed musical compositions has passed the 1000 mark (300 of its items also being accompanied by an online audio fragment). There are now 3000 historical monuments online, 500 architectural landmarks, 4000 paintings and 400 murals, and 1200 textual specimens of writing in verse or prose (discursive or fictional).

In addition, our 38,000-strong repertory of correspondence metadata will soon be strengthened by the addition of the voluminous and transnational letter-writing network of Hoffmann von Fallersleben (with the kind permission and cooperation of Dr Erika Poettgens and Waxmann Publishers). All of these materials allow also for an online visualization of their diffusion across space and time.[....]

NISE and SPIN are planning closer cooperation in the future. Both institutions are dedicated to the critical and transnational study of nationalism in Europe, and within that common framework their emphases and approaches usefully complement each other: while SPIN is concerned with intellectual history, cultural production and the diffusion of ideas, NISE’s focus is on an archive-based study of sociability, associational life and sociocultural mobilization.

In addition, both NISE and SPIN are hubs aiming to bring international network together in collaborative enterprises. These networks show a pronounced overlap, so that it was felt that both Antwerp and Amsterdam had much to gain from a more structural integration of their (already harmonious) contacts.[....]

SPIN will be hosting a conference on the Grimm brothers on 7-9 December 2016. All lectures are open to all those interested. [[download file="2016-12/grimm-ripples.pdf" icon="" text="Full program." title="" ]]