
PROGRAMME
PROGRAMME
PROGRAMME
GRACEH 2026, 15-17 APRIL
The Steven A. Schwarzman
Centre for the Humanities
14:00 Registration and welcome refreshments (Schwarzman Centre Atrium)
15:00 Opening remarks (L1 Lecture Theatre)
15:30-17:00
Panel 1 - Epistemic Rupture: Rewriting and Reshaping Science and Medicine (L1 Lecture Theatre)
Chair: Professor Stéphane Van Damme (Maison Française d'Oxford)
Aiofe Kearins (University of Oxford), Radiation and Rhetoric: Naming and Knowing in 19th Century Mathematical Physics
Duncan Murray (University of British Columbia), Along the Diagnostic Frontier: Racial Science, Human Migration, and the Medicalization of Criminality in French Algeria, 1884-1933
Viola Lászlófi (Central European University), Rupture in Policy, Rupture in Practice? Informal Payment and the Moral Economy of Care in State-Socialist Hungary, 1950s–1970s
Panel 2- Recurring Rupture: Individuals, Politics, and Experiences of Exile (Room 20.402)
Chair: Dr Olga Khomenko (University of Oxford)
Julia Carrera (University of Vienna), Experiencing Rupture: Joseph Buttinger and the Fragmented Nature of Biographic Breaks
Laura del Alisal (University of Oxford), Between Reaction and Revolution: Pi i Margall, Theory and Experience of Recurrent Rupture in Nineteenth-Century Spain
Maria Pantazi (European University Institute), Ruptured Worlds, Enduring Ties: Escape, Survival, and Trajectories of Salonican Jews
Maison française d'Oxford
17:30-18:30
Keynote Lecture: Professor Lyndal Roper
The German Peasants' War as a Moment of Rupture
A catered drinks reception will be held following Professor Roper's lecture. We invite all speakers to join!
16 April
The Steven A. Schwarzman
Centre for the Humanities
9:00 Welcome refreshments
Please join us for some light refreshments in the History Hub
9:30-11:15
Panel 3 - Making Sense in Rupture, Making Sense of Rupture (L1 Lecture Theatre)
Chair: Dr Norman Aselmeyer (University of Oxford)
Anil Atilgan (Central European Institute), Overproduction and the Politics of Rupture in Early Nineteenth-Century Political Economy
Pia Paul (University of California, Berkeley), Rupture Without Event: Chronic Instability and the Limits of Historical Turning Points
Thomas Glasman (University of Oxford), Mathematical Crisis as Social Crisis
Denys Tereshchenko (European University Institute), Relying on Rupture to Reform: Demography in the Academy of Sciences in Kyiv (1918-1919)
Panel 4- Remembering Rupture (Room 20.402)
Chair: Dr Katherine Lebow (University of Oxford)
Karolina Cholewa (Jagiellonian University), Executed, Yet Remembered: Jacobite Scaffold Writings and the Making of Rupture after 1746
Emyleigh Simoes (University of Toronto), Narrating the Russian Revolution of 1905: Contemporary Perspectives and Retrospective Understandings
Theresa Langer (University of Bielefeld and Trinity College Dublin), Maintaining the Rupture: The Pedagogical Construction of the GDR in German as a Foreign Language
11:15-11:30 Break
Please join us for some light refreshments in Room 10.302 (behind the L1 Lecture Theatre)
11:30-13:00
Panel 6- Voicing Rupture: Literature and the Underground (L1 Lecture Theatre)
Chair: Ioana Zamfir (University of Oxford)
Rashel Zemlinskaya (University of Oxford), What it Means to Have Had a Renaissance: Soviet Historical Imagination in 1970s Underground Fiction
Alexander Beard (University of Oxford), East German Literati and the Epistemic Rupture of 1989
Julia Boechat Machado (Central European University), Liberation as Collapse: Tamizdat Publishers During the Glasnost' Era
13:00-14:00 Lunch
Please note that lunch is self-catered. If you would like any suggestions, feel free to ask any one of the organisers and we will be happy to help.
14:00-15:30
Panel 7 - Recasting Legal Traditions: Rupture in the History of Civil Law (Room 20.402)
Chair: Dr Teresa Witcombe (University of Oxford)
Stephanie Rieder-Zagkla (University of Vienna), A Legal Rupture? The Austrian General Civil Code of 1811 and its Consequences for Spouses Seeking Divorce in the 19th and early 20th Centuries
Caleb Silvergleid (University of Oxford), Making a Different Civil Law: Ruptures Rather than Rediscovery of Roman Law in the Twelfth Century
Gunhyuk Lee (Central European Institute), From Christian to Muslim Society: Monastic Responses and the Role of Donation in Late Antique Egypt
Panel 8- Media and the Tools of Constructing National Identities (L1 Lecture Theatre)
Chair: Yevhen Yashchuk (University of Oxford)
Aimée Dion (University of Laval), From Continuity to Crisis: Visualizing Ruptures in Irish Great War Propaganda, 1914-1919
Wren Potter (McGill University), Choral Institutions and Cultural Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Yuliia Kishchuk (Södertörn University), Methodological "Ruptures" in "doing History" in Ukraine and Qazakhstan
15:30-15:45 Break
Please join us for some light refreshments in Room 10.302 (behind the L1 Lecture Theatre)
15:45-17:15
Panel 9 - Climates of Uncertainty: Rethinking and Regeneration in the Face of Change (Room 20.402)
Chair: Professor Glenda Sluga (European University Institute)
Sarah Evison (University of Basel), Ruptures in the Artic Ice: Soviet Climate Futures During the Cold War
Roberto Larrañaga Domínguez (European University Institute), The End of a Four-Century-Old Decadence: Spanish Regenerationism and History at the Fin-de-Siècle Crisis (1890-1914)
Matej Vodopivec (University of Ljubljana) and Tamara Logar (Institute of Contemporary History, Ljubljana), From Vienna to Belgrade: Imperial Collapse and the Birth of the Yugoslav Monarchy
Panel 10- Ruptured Belongings: Displacement and Identity Across Borders (L1 Lecture Theatre)
Chair: Professor Elena Bacchin (University of Vienna)
Élisabeth Heid (École Pratique des Hautes Études), Experiencing Ruptures away from Home: The French Actors and Actresses in Russia (1789-1918)
Hanna Sinclair (University of Oxford), The Nuptial Journey of Maria de’ Medici: A Rupture in Identity
Jessica Varela (Central European University) and Sun Parker Schuette (University of Edinburgh), Tensioning Belonging in Europe: Una Marson, Claudia Jones, and Audre Lorde in the UK and Germany (1932 – 1992)
Katharina Langolf (University of Leipzig), Between Gulag and Shoah: Mark Zhitnitskii's Art and the Experiece of Overlapping Ruptures
NOTE: Following the final panels of the day, we will be organising a small pub trip. If you would like to join, please write to graceh2026@history.ox.ac.uk, so we can have a sense of numbers. All are welcome to join!
17 April
The Steven A. Schwarzman
Centre for the Humanities
9:00 Welcome refreshments
Please join us for some light refreshments in the History Hub
9:30-11:00
Panel 11 - Beyond the Archives: Reading Cultural Ruptures Through Alternative Sources (L1 Lecture Theatre)
Chair: Professor László Kontler (Central European University)
Vesta Burk (Brown University), Mury: The Mythical Baggage of a Transnational Anthem
Anthony Popov (University of Toronto), From the Moral Economy to Laissez-Faire: Food Rioting, Hunger Politics, and Public Order in French Revolutionary Ballads
Saskia Heyn (University of Basel), Towards an Everyday Visual Grammar of Nation-Building in 20th-Century Ukraine
Emma Schwak (European University Institute), "L'abondance est revenue": The Directoire as Fantasized Rupture
Panel 12- Vice and Device: Conceptualising Rupture (Room 20.402)
Chair: Hannele Hellerstedt (University of Oxford)
Jana Christin Lammerding (University of Vienna), Reproductive Ruptures and the Witch
Georgie Crespi (University of Reading), Rupture in Medieval Drama
Brigitta Schvéd (University of Pécs and Ludovika UPS), Managing Rupture: The Balance of Power as a Language of Managed Change in Early Eighteenth-Century British and Habsburg-Hungarian Political Thought (1701-1714)
Petar Ćurčić (University of Belgrade), Capitalism as Rupture: Werner Sombart and the Conflictual Constitution of Modernity
Ertegun House
11:30-12:45
Keynote Lecture: Dr Daria Mattingly
Broken Orders: Catastrophe and the Making of Modern Europe
12:45-13:00
Closing remarks
A lunch reception will be held following the closing remarks. We invite all speakers to join!