Guest Lecturer Marta Grzechnik

This lecture looks at the Baltic Sea region in the 20th century, especially during the Cold War and its aftermath. It focuses on the various ideas and projects of region building that appeared around the Baltic Sea during that time and examine their success – or lack thereof. In so doing, it addresses questions relating to the opportunities and limitations of region building, the creation of collective identities and the diffusion of ideas across the region, placing them in the context of the legacies of the Cold War in Eastern Europe and also that of more long-term processes of historical development in both Eastern and Northern Europe.

Marta Grzechnik is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Scandinavian and Finnish Studies at the University of Gdańsk, Poland. She is a historian with research interests in the Baltic Sea region and Northern Europe, borderland studies, regional history and colonial history. She obtained her PhD in History and Civilisation from the European University Institute, Florence, in 2010. From 2012 to 2016 she was a postdoctoral researcher on the programme “Baltic Borderlands: Shifting Boundaries of Mind and Culture in the Borderlands of the Baltic Sea Region” at the University of Greifswald; and in 2018–2019 she was German Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies and Visiting Fellow at the Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global Transformations (WIGH), both at Harvard University, United States. 

Grzechnik, Marta. Regional Histories and Historical Regions: The Concept of the Baltic Sea Region in Polish and Swedish Historiographies. Geschichte, Erinnerung, Politik, Band 3. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012.

Musial, Kazimierz. ‘Benevolent Assistance and Cognitive Colonialisation: Nordic Involvement with the Baltic States since the 1990s’. In Histories of Public Democracy and Nation Branding in the Nordic and Baltic Countries. Representing the Periphery, edited by Louis Clerc, Nikolas Glover, and Paul Jordan, 257–82. Leiden, Boston: Brill Nijhoff, 2015.

All references are displayed in the video.

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