Building cultural nations. The matica and equivalent intermediary structures in Europe
A workshop will be organised jointly by CEU, SPIN and NISE at the Central European University in Budapest on 15 and 16 February 2012. The subject is the matica, a particular kind of society established by Slavic national movements in nineteenth-century Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, focused on (re)constructing and improving their cultures.
The workshop wants to carry out for the first time a comprehensive comparative study on a European scale of the matice and analogue institutions operating in other parts of Europe but with the same cultural goals. It will establish if the matice represented a specific form of cultural institution or if they have been only an emotionally effective name covering very different institutions and programs. The workshop wants to approach the topic from new perspectives: transnational history and the history of institutional and cultural transfers.
For more information on the subject, see Building cultural nations.