1st International Egodocumental Network Conference
Vilnius University, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, the University of Lodz, and the Egodocumental Research Group (https://egodocuments.umk.pl) organise an international conference focusing on research, development, and changing perceptions of egodocuments in the twenty-first century. The conference aims to bring together scholars from different disciplines to share their insights and to encourage interdisciplinary studies of egodocuments.
The conference will also be the first meeting of the International Egodocumental Network established in December 2023 by the Egodocumental Research Group (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and the University of Lodz) to unite scholars from different disciplines working on egodocuments. It provides a platform for discussion, collaboration, and exchange of information between the participants, as well as online research seminars organized twice a year. In this dimension, our conference continues two editions of the Scientific Symposium "Egodocuments, Life-Writing and Autobiographical Texts..." organized at NCU in Toruń in 2022 and 2024.
Keynote speakers
Dr. Nataliia Voloshkova
Kazimierz Wielki University and Oxford Brookes University
Prof. Leona Toker
Hebrew University and Shalem Academic College
Prof. François-Joseph Ruggiu
Sorbonne Université, CNRS and Oxford University
Dorota Magda
University of Lodz
The Kosovo Myth in Branislav Nušić’s Travel Diaries
The turn of the 19th and 20th centuries was a period of rapid socio-political changes in the Balkan Peninsula. The Ottoman occupation and fall of the Empire, the Austro-Hungarian expansion southwards, the birth of local nationalisms, two Balkan Wars, the First World War – all these events left their mark on the cultural identity and national self-identification of the southern Slavs, which – in turn – left its mark on all forms of art created by man, including literature.
This presentation will be an attempt to retrieve ego-documents out of the shadow of the literary borderland by exposing their significance for culturological studies. The main aim of the proposed research is to find an answer to the question of how the memoirs and travel journals of the Serbian writer Branislav Nušić (1864–1938) record and portray the categories of the founding myth, cultural identity and collective memory in the context of Kosovo – a culturally and politically controversial region, symbolizing the promised land and lost paradise. Branislav Nušić served as consul in Serbian diplomatic missions in Bitola (Macedonia) and Priština (Kosovo) in the years 1889–1900, where he wrote Travel Diaries documenting the fate of the Serbian nation in the South. Therefore, the presentation will also analyse elements of the writer’s (auto)biography, based on which, an attempt will be made to determine how the author perceived the category of myth and cultural identity and whether his perception was in line with the so-called ‘spirit of the times’ and corresponded to the worldview generally accepted by the society at that time.
