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.

A full and revised/updated ERNiE manual is now online on this website.

The manual gives full instructions on how to use the ERNiE website and to unlock its many features: Encyclopedia, Materials, Visualizations and Selections. We hope it will enhance your experience. You can access the manual under the Encyclopedia > Users’ Manual tab, the URL https://spinnet.eu/ernie/manual, or by clicking here.

E.A. Hoffmann von Fallersleben (1798-1874), Grimm adept, philologist and Vormärz poet, maintained an exensive correspondence with many European partners throughout his life. His letters have been repertoried by Dr. Erika Poettgens as part of her study Hoffmann von Fallersleben und die Lande niederländischer Zunge. Briefwechsel, Beziehungsgeflechte, Bildlichkeit (Münster: Waxmann, 2014). By courtesy of Dr Poettgens, and with the kind help and agreement of Waxmann publishers, SPIN was given the use of the corpus’s metadata. These were processed to put a visualization of Hoffmann’s network online. It can be accessed in the ERNiE website (http://ernie.uva.nl) under the “Letters” tab, or directly through this URL: https://ernie.uva.nl/viewer.p/21/59/scenario/114/geo. Hoffmann’s 7600 letters now feature in ERNiE alongside other major corpuses (the Grimms, Walter Scott, E.M. Arndt, Rasmus Rask, Prosper Mérimée...) to demonstrate the densely and transnationally entangled nature of Romantic Nationalism.  

One of SPIN’s first projects in 2009 was to digitize the proceedings of the famous gatherings of Germanisten in Frankfurt and Lübeck (1846 and 1847). Generally recognized as a key episode in the interaction between German philology and national politics, these meetings, chaired by Jacob Grimm, were an academic run-up to the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848. Their proceedings were only available in contemporary printed form and, given the Fraktur print of that period, even digitized PDFs were not searchable. SPIN curated a digitized full-text presentation in modern, searchable print, with an introduction by leading expert Katinka Netzer. That presentation had become, alas, inaccessible in the process of mounting the ERNiE website. But the full Proceedings have now been placed back online and will provide researchers with what we hope is a valuable resource. To access: http://show.ernie.uva.nl/germanisten.

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The Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe was mentioned in the list of Times Literary Supplement’s «Books of the Year» for 2018. The list is compiled annually by the TLS’s reviewers; ERNiE was Tom Shippey’s choice. The list is online here.

The website of the Netherlands Royal Library now shows an interactive tool visualizing the relative canonicity over time of a selected number of historical Dutch figures. The tool was built with nodegoat technology (also used in ERNiE) and the underlying research was done by Joep Leerssen during his tenure as Royal Library Research Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies. More at http://lab.kb.nl/tool/canot.

The State of Nationalism (SoN), the excellent online review presenting survey articles on various aspects of nationalism studies, has just published Dean Kostantaras’s “Nationalism and Social Class”.

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).