The key research area is characterised by addressing major and current topics ("societal challenges") that are interdisciplinary in nature. The title reflects this bundle of research topics in an exemplary way. However, it is also about migration, social cohesion, identity and diversity, religious diversity, ethnic processes, intercultural comparison, social change, discourse and power, historical memory and political representation, and a range of other topics and their interrelations. What the research projects in this key research area have in common is that current approaches and research topics are tested on source material from the past, thus providing insights into long-term processes. This makes research into the distant past relevant to the present. By indexing important source material and incorporating comparative questions, methodological markers are set at the same time.
The key research area will continue to strive for high potential and visibility by acquiring high-level grants and third-party funding. With the open-access journal "Medieval Worlds" (published twice a year since 2015), it has an important publication medium.
News
The SFB Visions of Community (in which Christina Lutter, Walter Pohl and Oliver Schmitt, as well as numerous junior researchers, were involved as PIs for the faculty) may have ended in 2019, but the results are still being published.
In 2021, these included the volumes
- ‘Empires and Communities in the Post-Roman and Islamic World, c. 400 – 1000 CE’, eds. Walter Pohl/ Rutger Kramer published by Oxford University Press,
- ‘Historiography and Identity 4: Writing History Across Medieval Eurasia’, eds. Walter Pohl/Daniel Mahoney published by Brepols,
- Practicing Communities in Urban and Rural Eurasia (100-1600): Comparatives Perspectives and Interdisciplinary Approaches’, eds. Fabian Kümmeler/Eirik Hovden/Judit Majorossy published by Brill and
- the special issue from History & Anthropology 32/2, 2021, "Kinship and Gender Relations across Historical Asia and Europe: Comparative Reassessments between the 8th and 19th Centuries CE", eds. Andre Gingrich/Christina Lutter published by Routlegde.
A detailed summary of the project and its results, with bibliographical references and images, can be found in the ‘VISCOM Companion’ (2019), at https://www.oeaw.ac.at/fileadmin/Institute/imafo/pdf/forschung/HI/viscom_companion_webbook.pdf.
The Cluster of Excellence "EurAsian Transformations", submitted in 2021 as a pre-proposal to the excellent=austria programme, is linked to the SFB's global historical approach. Led by Claudia Rapp, the project includes the three ‘thematic nodes’ Geographies of Power, Communication and Mobility and Identities and Religions, which cover key aspects of the key research area. From the faculty, Oliver Schmitt and Walter Pohl are on the Board of Directors, as are Bernhard Palme, Naoise MacSweeney, Wolfgang Müller, Juliane Schiel and Wolfgang Nickel.
In 2020 the ERC Synergy Grant "Integrating genetic, archaeological and historical perspectives on Eastern Central Europe, 400-900" (PI Walter Pohl),was launched, which is a collaboration between history, archaeology, genetics and anthropology and breaks new ground in the methodology of historical interpretation of genetic data.The Faculty is home to the working group led by Walter Pohl, which also includes Salvatore Liccardo as a postdoc and Sandra Wabnitz as a predoc.
Due to the cancellation of planned events as a result of the pandemic, the activities in the key research area Community, Conflict and Integration otherwise focused on the continuation of the pilot project City and Community (2017/18) funded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the City of Vienna in a subsequent database project on the topic of social networks in late medieval Vienna supported by the same funding bodies (2020/21, PL Christina Lutter). In these projects, we are systematically recording the holdings of the Quellen zur Geschichte der Stadt Wien (QGStW) and the so-called Wiener Stadtbücher, (1395-1430) with regard to kinship and gender relations, communities of property, and the economy of the afterlife. The project combines prosopography, social network analysis, and digital humanities, thus also contributing to the optimisation of factoid prosopography for central source holdings on the history of Vienna.