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Revenant—Revivals of Empire: Nostalgia, Amnesia, Tribulation
Revenant—Revivals of Empire: Nostalgia, Amnesia, Tribulation
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Designed and coordinated by Dr. Jeremy F. REVENANT pursues two overarching research questions.
"REVENANT - Revivals of Empire: Nostalgia, Amnesia, Tribulation" is a newly-funded European Research Council Consolidator Grant (ERC-101002908) based at University of Rijeka, succeeding the "Empires of Memory" research group (2016-22) at mpi-mmg. Across central and eastern Europe, the Balkans, central Asia and the Caucasus, and the Middle East, bygone imperial projects are increasingly inseparable
from contemporary political, social, and cultural life. From gargantuan statues to pocketsize tchotchkes, embodied in both rose-tinted visions of imperial multiculturalism and the persistent anxiety and loathing of post-imperial nationalisms, the empires of the past exert pressure on the present, even as they respond to the present’s demands. The research project REVENANT (Revivals of Empire: Nostalgia, Amnesia, Tribulation), based at the Department of Cultural Studies, of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka, and supported by ERC grant #101002908, seeks to examine contemporary collective memories and legacies of the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov Empires from a capacious, comparative, and interdisciplinary perspective. Walton, REVANANT constitutes the first comprehensive research project to grapple with these complex, overlapping post-imperial memories and legacies. First, how do collective memories of the Habsburg, Ottoman and Romanov Empires achieve articulation through ensembles of persons, places and things? Secondly, how do imperial legacies complicate and contradict the personifications, emplacements, and materializations of post-imperial memories? The threefold heuristic of persons, places, and things determines three secondary research questions. First, how and why do certain historical personages galvanize collective memories of empires? Secondly, how do specific places become sites of post-imperial memory, while other loci of imperial legacies escape commemoration? Thirdly, how are bygone empires embodied through a variety of objects and material culture? The sites, cities, and regions that orient REVENANT span a vast geography between the Alps and the Urals, the Baltic and the Aegean. They include the former imperial capitals of Vienna, Istanbul, and St. Petersburg; post-imperial port cities such as Rijeka, Thessaloniki, and Odessa; and the erstwhile borderlands of the Balkans, Bukovina and Galicia, and the Caucasus.
18/03/2026
We are pleased to announce the publication of “Postempire: On Memory, Legacy and Deimperiality” by REVENANT’s PI, Jeremy F. Walton, in the journal Memory Studies. 📖 The article is open access, and can be read or downloaded from the website here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17506980261425540 Postempire offers a systematic theory of postimperial studies based on REVENANT’s broad research perspective.
👨🏫Our research group leader Dr. Jeremy F. Walton was invited to participate this year's first Global Memories Reading Group, scheduled tomorrow at 3:00 PM Central European Time, to present his most recent work on memory and deimperiality. Texts can be provided for reading to anyone interested 📚📖
➡️Learn more about the MSA Global Memories Working Group here:
Home - Global Memories Working Group
What is the Global Memories Working Group ? The Global Memories working group is interested in the diverse and multidirectional ways in which memories travel across the globe, memories that exist across local, transcultural, transnational and planetary scales. How are ideas, objects and events remem...
08/01/2026
The weather seems cold outside 🥶🌬️ but we're warming up soon with our new lecture coming up next Monday! 👨🏫🎼🎹 Visit us in Rijeka and find out more about the interesting topic below! 🎶🎻🎵
We have something very interesting in plan next week! 🗓️9️⃣ Join us for a visiting lecture and book presentation on Tuesday 9 December! More details about time & location below! 📰📚📖🧑🏫🏙️
29/09/2025
Our team member Magdalena is currently in Sweden on Erasmus+ mobility. 👩🏫 This Saturday she attended the premiere of Anton Dvořák’s "Rusalka" at the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm. 🎼🎶 Alongside the performance, she noted intriguing details in the theatre’s architecture — subtle reminders of Sweden's great monarchs and a telling sign of opera’s long-standing closeness to state and power. 🏰⛲️⚜️
23/09/2025
As Thursday approaches, we're excited to announce our upcoming lecture by Prof. Dr. Ann Rigney, one of the foremost theorists in Memory Studies! 👩🏫🕑⬇️ Find more details below, and join us for an interesting afternoon in Rijeka!
25/07/2025
The summer school “Re-writing the Empire: Eastern European Postimperial Memories in Transregional Perspective” took place from 19.7.2025 to 24.7.2025 at the Moise Palace in Cres, Croatia. Organized by Magdalena Marija Meašić and Thomas Fritz Maier, the summer school brought together young scholars from across Europe to contribute to the discussion of memory discourses and their potency in the context of Eastern Europe’s historical transitions in the 20th and 21st centuries. In addition to presentations by our participants, the summer school also included keynotes by Dr. Boris Noordenbos (University of Amsterdam), Dr. Jeremy Walton (University of Rijeka) and Dr. Anna Hodel (University of Basel) as well as a workshop by Dr. Slaven Crnić and Dr. Ivan Flis (University of Rijeka). A big thanks to the Moise Palace Team for the support! 🏛🏖🎉
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