What does it mean to write about places and regions that consistently refuse tidy national or imperial narratives, the teleologies of modernization, and racialized notions of Europeanness? Central Ukraine, Transylvania, and much of Eastern Europe took shape in the overlapping shadows of the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg empires, where borders, loyalties, and identities were never singular, and where the past stubbornly resists efforts to straighten it out. The same could be said of the Caribbean—and it is partly from the Caribbean experience of colonial entanglement at Europe's own Atlantic borders, that new ways of thinking about European history have emerged.
In this fellows’ conversation, historian Andrii Portnov and sociologist Manuela Boatcă will talk with Taras Fedirko about their use of the concepts of “entangled history,” “entanglement,” and “creolization” to capture this condition of interconnection and interdependence. They will discuss what a historical and sociological study of a particular place or region—the city of Dnipro for Portnov, the region of Transylvania for Boatcă—can teach us about regional and global interconnections, especially as these become visible in times of crises.
Manuela Boatcă is a historical social scientist working at the intersection of the social sciences and cultural and literary studies. Since 2015, she has been a professor of sociology and heads the Global Studies Program at the University of Freiburg in Germany. Her research focuses on the political economy of global inequalities, gender and citizenship, coloniality, unequal Europes, and the Caribbean. Her book Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (Cornell University Press, 2022), co-authored with Anca Parvulescu, has been published in English, German, and Romanian.
Andrii Portnov is a historian who studied at Dnipro University and Warsaw University and defended his PhD at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Lviv. Since 2012, he has taught and conducted research in Germany, holding positions at Humboldt University and Free University of Berlin, among others, and fellowships at institutions including the IWM Vienna and the Historisches Kolleg in Munich. From 2018 to 2025, he was a professor of Entangled History of Ukraine at the European University Viadrina. He is the author of more than ten books and 250 academic publications. His book Dnipro: An Entangled History of a European City received the Ab Imperio Book Prize in 2023.
IWM Senior Research Fellow Taras Fedirko will moderate the conversation.
