Online lecture – What is European history (in Ireland)?

Join us on the seventh and last session of the “Critical heritage studies at Arqus: concepts, approaches and findings” online guest lecture series, titled “What is European history (in Ireland)?”, with Dejan Djokić (Maynooth University). The online lecture will take place on 5 February 2026 at 18:00 CET.

Drawing on his experience of teaching European history in Ireland since 2023, following a career spent mostly in the UK, Dejan Djokić offers some preliminary, often personal thoughts on several related questions pertaining to studying European history today, including:

• Advantages/challenges of approaching the history of Europe from a ‘double periphery’: a historian of the Balkans based at an Irish university;
• Following on from that, should we understand Ireland and the Balkans as Europe’s peripheries or perhaps as crossroads? Are they even solely European, or do we need to look more widely to understand their histories and European history more generally?
• Does the historian’s physical location impact on her/his research and teaching? In other words, is European history the same in Ireland as in Britain and in the Balkans?
• Can these and similar questions (which are about symbolic geography as much as they are about history and geography) help us answer a seemingly straightforward, but in fact highly complex question of what European history is European histor isy?
• Finally, how does the seeming resurgence of the nation state in the past decade (the ‘Migrant crisis’, Covid-19, rise of right-wing populism globally) impact the study of European history?

About the speaker

Dejan Djokić is a Full Professor of History at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He was previously Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he founded the Centre for the Study of the Balkans. He is also a founding co-convener of Rethinking Modern Europe, a research seminar hosted by the Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London. Dejan’s publications include A Concise History of Serbia (Cambridge, 2023), Pašić & Trumbić: The Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (London, 2010) and Elusive Compromise (London, 2007). He is currently working on an autoethnographic account of the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1990-1991.