“Shared Stages, Entangled Pasts” examines how artistic performance, scientific display, and popular spectacle have historically shaped the comparative construction of ethnic and national identities across Baltic and German contexts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The project approaches the Baltic-German region as a historically entangled political and cultural context shaped by the circulation of shared methods for staging and interpreting human difference. The project will bring together scholars from the Baltic States and Germany for a seven-day research program in Saulkrasti, Latvia.

The project focuses on how performing bodies – functioning as artistic media, scientific evidence, and public spectacle – have reflected, constructed, and challenged notions of ethnic and national identity. Participants will present case studies on living ethnological exhibitions, touring human zoos, traveling performance troupes, and exchanges of modernist dancers between Germany and the Baltic States, illuminating reciprocal relationships between artistic practice and scientific discourse through these histories.

Contributing presenters will investigate how interregional academic and cultural exchange shaped concepts such as Indigeneity, Jewishness, Africanness, and Baltic Germanness while informing methodological and theoretical approaches to embodiment and ethnic/national identity. The program will take place during the Nordic Summer University’s annual summer session, which convenes more than 100 researchers across ten international study circles. Within this interdisciplinary environment, contributing scholars will engage with participants in the Studies in Remoteness symposium, “Time Work: Debt, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Practice,” exchanging methodologies for investigating historical debt, colonial legacies, and complex pasts across Nordic, Baltic, and circumpolar regions.