Research

First ERC Grant to Tallinn University

In June 2018, the five-year project “Between the Times, Embattled Temporalities and Political Imagination in Interwar Europe” will begin at Tallinn University School of Humanities.

Liisi Keedus

In June 2018, the five-year project “Between the Times, Embattled Temporalities and Political Imagination in Interwar Europe” will begin at Tallinn University School of Humanities. The project is run by Senior Research Fellow Liisi Keedus and supported by the European Research Council with 1,425,000 Euros. Liisi is a returning researcher who came back to Estonia with the Mobilitas Pluss returning researcher programme.

“In addition to myself, the project will be run by at least three post-docs and two PhD students. Some subjects are open to contribution by top researchers, e.g. art and literature researchers, and research philosophers,” explained Liisi Keedus and added that the project will organise at least 5 international research events (including conferences and summer universities) in Tallinn and share the results with a wider audience (e.g. via publishing e-learning materials). The project team is also happy to collaborate with museums.

“Progressivism has never been a systematically framed ideology, but it has a considerable role in the identity discourse of today’s Estonia and the European Union. On the other hand, the new reality of Europe is a deep crisis, which can be measured as the divide between the progressivist “horizon of expectation” and the newly disillusioned “space of experience”,” says Liisi explaining the idea behind the project. The project will map and analyse the paradigms that faced progressivism after World War I. “How did they dismantle the circular structure between ontological framework, epistemological claims and ethics of historical relativism, and what have been the most important political and theoretical echoes – and what is the legacy of all this?” are the questions Liisi and her team are looking to answer in the coming years.

In addition, Liisi Keedus calls on every teacher and museum curator to sign up in case they wish to collaborate with the project team.

ERC Grants are some of the most important grants in Europe. Only five have been awarded to Estonian researchers thus far: to ethnobotanist Renata Sõukand, plant physiologist Ülo Niinemets, law researcher Lauri Mälksoo, biomedical researcher Tambet Teesalu, and biologist Mart Loog.

Additional information:
Liisi Keedus

Tallinn University, School of Humanities, Senior Researcher 

lkeedus@tlu.ee