Imperial Subjects. Autobiographical Practices and Historical Change in the Continental Empires of the Romanovs, the Habsburgs and the Ottomans. (Mid 19th and early 20th Centuries)

该项目的重点是19世纪末和20世纪初三个东欧帝国的帝国精英代表的自传体实践。在这三个帝国，人们可以观察到自世纪中期以来自传体写作和出版物的兴起。到目前为止，这些发展主要被解读为主体性文化发展的指标，不仅包括资产阶级圈子，而且包括贵族和其他社会阶层。各个社会对个人生活故事日益增长的兴趣在多大程度上反映了理解19世纪下半叶三大帝国深刻结构变化的必要性，迄今为止，这个问题还没有得到多少关注：民族和革命运动的出现，俄罗斯和哈布斯堡帝国的领土扩张，奥斯曼帝国的领土完整受到越来越大的威胁，迫使这些大国努力解决帝国领土问题。全面的国内政治改革，例如19世纪60年代和70年代的大改革，俄国1905年革命后的宪政转向，1867年奥匈妥协，或1839年起奥斯曼帝国的坦齐马特，以及工业化和城市化导致的新社会阶层的政治出现，导致了权力的转移。结构和传统政治秩序合法性的危机。面对这些激进的政治和社会经济变革和挑战，极大地刺激了19世纪末20世纪初三个多民族帝国公众中自传体的繁荣。这个研究项目的目的是阅读自传体的做法作为一种社会沟通的行为，并分析自我文件的选定群体的演员方面的解释帝国统治，帝国空间的感知模式和竞争的概念的影响力的集体身份的帝国，民族，社会，宗教，性别特异性，或政治性质。该项目结合了比较和跨国历史的方法。因此，它有望对帝国身份概念的内容和传播以及帝国在现代黎明时作为想象中的共同体的运作产生重要的见解。作为牵头机构的巴塞尔大学的研究小组将与慕尼黑大学的路德维希马克西米利安和慕尼黑学院合作开展该项目。这些机构能够汇集他们在俄罗斯，奥斯曼帝国和哈布斯堡帝国的杰出历史专业知识。除了6篇学术论文、1篇博士后论文和5篇论文以及3个小案例研究外，还计划为初级研究人员举办讲习班和3次国际会议。

The project focuses on autobiographical practices of representatives of imperial elites in the three Eastern European empires in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In all three empires, one can observe a rise in autobiographical writing and publications since the middle of the 19th century. Until now, these developments were read primarily as an indicator of a developing culture of subjectivity, encompassing not only bourgeois circles, but also the nobility and other social strata. The question to which extent this growing interest of the respective societies in individual life-stories reflected the need to make sense of the profound structural changes in all three great empires during the second half of the 19th century has so far received little attention: The emergence of national and revolutionary movements, the territorial expansion of the Russian and Habsburg Empires, and the growing threat to the Ottoman Empire s territorial integrity forced these powers to grapple with the question of imperial territoriality. Comprehensive domestic political reforms, for example the Great Reforms in the 1860s and 1870s and the constitutional turn after the Revolution of 1905 in Russia, the Compromise between Austria and Hungary in 1867, or the Tanzimat in the Ottoman Empire from 1839 onwards and the political emergence of new social classes as a result of industrialization and urbanization led to shifts in the power structures and to crises in the legitimacy of the traditional political order. The encounter with these radical political and socio-economic changes and challenges significantly stimulated the autobiographical boom among the public in the three multinational empires in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The aim of this research project is to read autobiographical practices as an act of social communication and to analyze ego documents of selected groups of actors with regard to the interpretation of imperial rule, patterns of perception of imperial spaces and the influence of competing concepts of collective identity of an imperial, national, social, religious, gender-specific, or political nature. The project combines approaches of comparative and transnational history. Therefore, it promises significant insights into the content and the dissemination of concepts of imperial identity and the functioning of empires as imagined communities at the dawn of the modern age. The research group at the University of Basel as Lead Agency will work collaboratively with the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Collegium Carolinum to conduct the project. These institutions are able to pool their outstanding historical expertise on the Russian, Ottoman and Habsburg empires. In addition to six academic theses, 1 PostDoc and 5 dissertations, and three minor case studies, workshops for junior researchers and three international conferences are planned.