News

June 2026

• Timo Aava gave a presentation entitled ‘Revisiting Jewish Life in Interwar Estonia: The Jewish Self-Government’ in Kaunas at the conference ‘Jewish Life in the Baltic States, 1917-1945’, organised by The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Vytautas Magnus University, and Sugihara Diplomats for Life Foundation.
• Oliver Rowe gave a presentation entitled ‘After Godot Arrives: The Idea of the All-Russian Constituent Assembly after its Dissolution, 1918-1920’ at the second “Parliamentary Junctures in Continental Europe” conference (‘Recombining Representation During the Transformation from Empires to Nation-States 1905-1923‘) hosted by the University of Warsaw.
• Timo Aava participated in a roundtable discussion on Jewish cultural autonomy today at the conference celebrating 100 years of Jewish cultural autonomy in Estonia. The conference was co-organised by the Estonian Jewish Museum and the Estonian ministries of Culture, the Interior, and Justice and Digital Affairs.

May 2026

• On May 22, a presentation was held for the Estonian translation of Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism”. The discussion, moderated by Eva Piirimäe, brought together political theorist Siobhan Kattago and translator Merily Salura.
• Eva Piirimäe participated in the workshop “Small States in Central European History” held at the University of Cambridge on May 15 (organized by Jean-Michel Johnston and Anna Ross).
• The project team met to continue discussing the relationship(s) between nation-statehood and federalism, centred again on several texts, this time primarily covering the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some ideas for the project’s first workshop were also discussed.

April 2026

• The project team met to discuss the relationship(s) between nation-statehood and federalism, seeking to establish a typology of the latter that assists the subsequent work of the project. Numerous texts were read and discussed, with the ultimate aim of creating a set of questions for the project’s upcoming first workshop in autumn (TBC).
• The April issue of Akadeemia contains a translation of Garlieb Merkel’s introduction to “The Latvians”, along with an accompanying essay by translator Kadi Kähär-Peterson. This essay also examines how Merkel’s work was received in the second half of the 19th century.

March 2026

• The project team met to discuss the introduction to Timo Aava’s book manuscript, Mark Mazower’s works on human rights, and C. A. Macartney’s National States and National Minorities.
• Kadi Kähär-Peterson presented a paper on the various meanings of the term ‘Balt’ in the 1930s and after World War II at the 2nd Annual Conference of the Estonian Humanities, titled “Hic sunt dracones. Humanitarian Worlds” that took place in Tartu from 8 to 10 April.

February 2026

• The project team met to discuss Hannah Arendt’s conceptualisation of the nation-state, mainly via The Origins of Totalitarianism.
• On February 27, Kadi Kähär-Peterson gave a presentation on Garlieb Merkel’s political thought at the National Library of Latvia. The presentation was followed by a discussion with Pauls Daija and Ivars Ijabs. A recording of the event was featured on the National Library of Latvia’s podcast “Klausītava,” which can be listened to on SoundCloud or Spotify.

January 2026

• The project team had their first official meeting, centred mainly on a discussion of Oliver Rowe’s doctoral dissertation and, by extension, Russian ideas of the nation-state and related concepts.
• Kadi Kähär-Peterson attended the conference “From Empire to Minority: Baltic Germans from Late Nineteenth Century to the 1930s”, held in Riga on January 23–24 and organized by the University of Latvia, Yale University, and the Estonian Academy of Arts.

December 2025

• News of the project’s successful application was shared, and the project team met virtually for a preliminary discussion about the goals of and practicalities surrounding the project’s work.