Studies in Remoteness presented the lecture series “Shared Stages, Entangled Pasts” as a part of its summer 2026 symposium “Time Work: Debt, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Practice”, hosted by the Nordic Summer University in Saulkrasti, Latvia. The project will publish proceedings online and open access through Refubium at Freie Universität Berlin and DSpace at the University of Latvia.
Lecture series presenters examined 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.
Approaching 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 brought together scholars from the Baltic States and Germany for a seven-day research program focused 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 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 took place at theNordic Summer University’s summer session, which convened more than 100 researchers across ten international study circles. Within this interdisciplinary environment, contributing scholars engaged with participants in the Studies in Remoteness symposium, exchanging methodologies for investigating historical debt, colonial legacies, and complex pasts across Nordic, Baltic, and circumpolar regions.
This project of the Baltic-German University Liaison Office is supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) with funds from the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic Germany.
