Jeremy F. Walton is the leader of 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. Prior to his current position, he held research and teaching fellowships at the Center for Advanced Studies of Southeastern Europe at the University of Rijeka, the CETREN Transregional Research Network at Georg August University of Göttingen, Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, and New York University’s Religious Studies Program. He received his Ph.D. 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. He has published his research in a wide selection of scholarly journals, including American Ethnologist, Sociology of Islam, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, and Die Welt des Islams. “Empires of Memory,” which Dr. Walton designed, is an interdisciplinary, multi-sited project on the cultural politics of post-imperial memory and history in eight former Habsburg and Ottoman cities: Vienna, Istanbul, Budapest, Sarajevo, Trieste, Thessaloniki, Zagreb, and Belgrade. His research in the context of “Empires of Memory” examines the ambivalent legacies and modes of amnesia that emerge from specific sites of memory in each of these cities.
Maura Hametz is a Professor of History at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, USA, specializing in the history of Italy and the late Habsburg empire since the late nineteenth century. Her research explores the intersections of politics, culture, memory, law, religion, gender, and ethnic and national identity. She is the author of In the Name of Italy (Fordham U. Press, 2012) and Making Trieste Italian, 1918-1954 (Boydell and Brewer [Royal Historical Association new series], 2005) and co-editor of Jewish Intellectual Women in Central Europe, 1860-2000 (Mellen, 2012), and Sissi’s World:The Empress Elisabeth in Myth and Memory (Bloomsbury Press, 2018 [forthcoming July]). In addition to further work on monuments, memory and Sissi in Trieste, she is currently working on projects that explore the contours of citizenship in the northern Adriatic post-Habsburg states, Virginian (American) World War I veterans ideas on war and faith, and notions of violence, intimidation, and justice in Fascist Italy articulated in the context of the Special Tribunal for the Defense of the State.
Alice von Bieberstein is a social anthropologist and EURIAS-fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Germany. Her research has focused on the politics of history and citizenship in relation to minority subjectivity in Germany and Turkey. Her more recent project is on local engagements with and value extraction from the material remains of Armenian heritage in far-Eastern Turkey. Her work has appeared in various journals, including Subjectivity, Social Research, and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
