Sharpening the Haze

GIULIA CARABELLI is a sociologist (PhD Queen’s University Belfast) and a member of the “Empires of memory” research group. Her current project is a comparative and ethnographic study of ‘Viennese’ coffeehouses in Vienna, Trieste, Budapest, and Sarajevo. Reflecting on the imperial imprint of these preserved establishments, the project explores how the legacies of the Austro-Hungarian empire affect processes of identity formation and aspirations in these cities. Her first book, The Divided City and the Grassroots. The (un)making of ethnic divisions in Mostar was published in 2018 by Palgrave.

MILOŠ JOVANOVIĆ is a historian, urban studies scholar and member of the “Empires of Memory” Max Planck Research Group (2016-19). Miloš’ research interests include the Balkans, Ottoman and Habsburg Empires, capitalism, Marxist theory and history, and visual methods. He is presently completing an urban history of post-Ottoman Belgrade and Sofia, as well as an interdisciplinary study of imperial historicity in four Danubian cities, from Vienna to Ruse. With KURS, Miloš is the co-author of the feature-length documentary Waterfront - a post-Ottoman post-socialist story (Germany/Serbia, 2018). Since November 2019, he is Assistant Professor of History at University of California, Los Angeles. He is interested in history as an emancipatory practice.

ANNIKA KIRBIS is a social anthropologist and a member of the “Empires of Memory” research group. In her doctoral research she explores the transformative potential of transnational memories, specifically the musealization of migration (hi)stories, and their impact on established museum collections in the context of Vienna's urban heritage. Her most recent research engages with the role of more-than-human imperial legacies. Tracing how an imperial wasteland turned into a natural monument, where once former Habsburg brickworks were located, she explores the notion of heritage-making as multispecies collaboration.

JEREMY F. WALTON leads the Max Planck Research Group, “Empires of Memory: The Cultural Politics of Historicity in Former Habsburg and Ottoman Cities,” at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (MPI-MMG) in Göttingen, Germany. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2009. Dr. Walton’s first book, Muslim Civil Society and the Politics of Religious Freedom in Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2017), is an ethnographic exploration of the relationship among Muslim civil society organizations, state institutions, and secularism in contemporary Turkey. “Empires of Memory,” which Dr. Walton designed, is an interdisciplinary, multi-sited project on the politics of post-imperial nostalgia and amnesia in eight cities in southeast and central Europe and the Balkans: Vienna, Istanbul, Budapest, Sarajevo, Trieste, Thessaloniki, Zagreb, and Belgrade