Online lecture in the Transnationalism Seminar Series, 29 January 2026, 12.00 CET

Current Committee member Natalya Bekhta (Tampere), Stanisław Krawczyk (Wrocław), Jana-Katharina Mende (Halle), Denys Shatalov (Kryvyi Rih/Berlin) and Oleksandr Zabirko (Regensburg) have jointly organised an online seminar series on transnationalism. This lecture within the series will take place on 29 January 2026, at 12.00 CET. Join via Zoom (link).

Eneken Laanes will speak about “Transnational Critique of Mass Violence and the Memory of the Environmental Impact of War”:

This seminar will approach the question of transnationalism from the perspective of memory studies, which as a discipline has been greatly challenged in recent years by the renewed wave of wars and mass violence in and around Europe. At the core of the development of memory studies in the 1980s and the 1990s was the memory of the Holocaust and Nazism in Europe. In the course of the transnationalisation of Holocaust memory and the multidirectional remembering of other histories of violence, such as slavery, European colonialism, and Stalinist repression, the transnational imperative of “never again” associated with Holocaust memory was extended to other histories of violence. However, the recent new wave of wars has shown that this imperative has failed. What would a transnational critique of violence look like at this historical moment of new mass violence against civilians?

The second part of the talk will focus on the environmental impact of new wars and mass violence, in particular in Ukraine, and on the ability of cultural and aesthetic media of memory to represent the different scales of environmental destruction. It will also highlight how new imperial wars re-member longer histories of slow imperial and colonial violence and exploitation in the region.

Eneken Laanes is Professor of Comparative Literature and head of the research project “Memory and Environment: The Intersection of Fast and Slow Violence in Transnational European Literatures” (2025–2029). Laanes’s research interests include transnational memory, contemporary transnational literature, trauma studies, post-socialist memory cultures in Central and Eastern Europe, multilingualism, visual history, and environmental history.

The seminar series is hosted by the research network “Young Network TransEurope” based at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.