The IHB conducts multidisciplinary research on the Habsburg Monarchy and the Balkan region. In order to create and enhance synergies and cooperation between the four research areas of IHB, the overarching platform “Spaces and Rule” was launched in Summer 2020. This institute-internal forum is to bundle research questions on spaces of rule, border (spaces) and their various textual and pictorial medialisations and make them fruitful for activities ranging from workshops to third-party funded projects.

“Spaces” are particularly well suited as a cross-cutting theme, as they form an analytical category that can be used in a variety of ways and have long been established as a research topic in the disciplines of history, art history, anthropology and linguistics that are located at IHB. Various spatial theories and concepts adapted to the respective disciplines are employed. Moreover, the multi-layered plurality of spaces and their perceptions is one of the characteristic features of the regions that are the focus of the Institute's research. They have been profoundly shaped by the ermegence of differentiating and competing, but also intertwined, ruling spaces and systems such as the Habsburg Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire. The platform is intended to open up the topic broadly in the form of individual projects.

CURRENT ACTIVITIES

The aim is to analyse the connections between the genesis and constitution of political-administrative spaces on the one hand and their different textual and visual medialisations on the other, with a focus on the territories of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Balkan region, which was Ottoman-dominated for a long time. Transcultural comparison will play a special role in making an overarching and guiding question, namely that of space in the early modern period, fruitful for different disciplines.