The Max Weber Network Eastern Europe (MWNO) conducts research on key problems of Eastern European history from the 16th to the 21st century and coordinates extensive digitization projects at the intersection of Eastern European and German history. It supports researchers who engage with the (post)imperial, (trans)national and local dimensions of Eastern European and German history along with processes of trans- and interimperial (dis)entanglements in multiethnic Eurasia.
The MWNO has a decentered setup with branches in Helsinki, Vilnius and Tbilisi with other locations to be added. It cooperates with local partner institutions as well as with the German Historical Institute Warsaw, the newly founded Research Center Ukraine and the Orient Institute Istanbul. This structure ties in all resources of the Max Weber Foundation in the region to provide research and networking opportunities to scholars specialized in the history of Eastern Europe in an international context by the way of research projects, different funding formats, events and publications.
Through the development of the MWNO, the Max Weber Foundation (MWS) responds to the challenges brought on, first and foremost, by Russia`s invasion of Ukraine and the political repressions and comprehensive threat to academic freedom within Russia and Belarus. As an academic network of smaller branch offices situated along transimperial contact zones that supports decentered archival research, the MWNO`s mission is to encourage a shift in perspective onto the histories of the larger region, to reflect on historiographical practices in a transnational perspective and to further innovative research and cooperation. MORE
