Center of Excellence

Fourteen students from Sweden, Finland, Poland, Denmark and Iceland were ready in their seats this morning, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the first lecturer at the ReNEW Summer School 2019, which kicked off today at the University of Iceland in collaboration with EDDA – Center of Excellence and the Gender Equality Studies and Training (GEST) Programme.

To mark the centenary of the end of the First World War, a symposium – sponsored by the EDDA Research Center and the Institute of History at the University of Iceland (UI) in cooperation with the French and German Embassies in Reykjavik – will be held on 23 November 2018 (see program, abstracts, and bios below). The focus is on the broad experience of war and its political reverberations, on the one hand, and its influence on Iceland’s path toward sovereignty from Denmark, on the other. At the symposium, which is entitled Legacies of 1918: Sovereignty, New States and the Collapse of Empires after the First World War, two world-known scholars give keynote lectures. Robert Gerwarth, Professor of Modern History at University College Dublin (UCD), deals with the break-up of empires in 1918, which led to the formation of new nation-states and which created explosive legacies that can still be felt in the present. He stresses the cycle of violence – having begun before the war and continued until 1923 – which affected hundreds of millions across the imperial world. Annette Becker, Professor of Modern History at the University of Paris – Ouest Nanterre La Défense, explores the Great War’s “sacred traces” and the memories of the dead over a century and how mourning, refugees, war, pacifism and sacrifice may have contributed to a global European identity.  Read more »

The EDDA Research Center,  in cooperation with the ReNEW Excellence Hub, hosts an international conference—to be held at the University of Iceland on 19–20 October 2018—on emergency politics. It brings together scholars in diverse academic fields to explore “states of exception” from historical and contemporary perspectives and in different geographies, with emphasis on Europe, the Nordic region, and the United States.

In the past two decades, Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben’s accounts of the “state of exception” have captured the imagination of scholars working in the fields of history, politics, law, economics, and literature. What has accompanied the resurgence of interest in “exceptions” is the proliferation and increasing use of government or supranational emergency powers or other extraordinary measures to deal with political and social unrest, terrorism, and financial crises. Read more »