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Conflicting Versions

Moving Pictures – Movements in Pictures. Protest Photography in Germany and Sweden, 1880-1918

Photos of protests evoke different associations. Whether they are blurry photos on social media or Pulitzer Prize-winning photo documentation, they share the commonality of transcending spatial boundaries and their potential to become history themselves. This project investigates how photographs related to protest movements for labor rights, women’s suffrage, and conservation between 1880 and 1918 in Germany and Sweden generated narratives and counter-narratives of the protesters, complementing or undermining written reports.

- Olga Syrova, 22.11.2025

Latvian Folk Ornament and Mythology Nexus as a Revival: Contested Historical Layers, Visualized Ideologies, and Commodified Creativity

Contemporary uses of folk ornament reach beyond the realm of traditional culture and it is a cultural phenomenon where belief, national and ethnic sentiments, esoteric outlook, commercialization and layers of historical meanings and contestations are intertwined in a mutually constitutive way. Through an ethnographic lens theoretically grounded in folklore studies, this dissertation explores the nexus of folk ornament and mythology in Latvia and its manifestations in different ideological constellations of the 20th century as well as contemporary settings.

- Olga Syrova, 22.11.2025

Ruth Maiers place – In the Context of Collective Memory and Life Writing

The 2007 publication of Ruth Maier’s Diary. A Jewish refugee in Norway marked a turning point in the reception of her writings. Previously on the margins of Norwegian memory culture, her life story became recognized as a vital testimony to the Holocaust and has since taken a central place in narratives of Norway’s occupation years.

- Olga Syrova, 22.11.2025

European Memory Conflicts Reflected in the Baltic Sea Region on the Example of “August 23rd”

"August 23rd", commemorating the historic date of the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, an agreement between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, is both known as the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes as well as the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and National Socialism. My project determines the debates surrounding “August 23rd” as an example for memory conflicts and for competitions over the (historical) authority of interpreting Europe’s violent history of the 20th century.

- Olga Syrova, 21.11.2025

On Belonging and Identity in the Post-WWII Baltic Diasporas as Mediated in Fiction and Life Writing

For the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian exile communities that emerged in the aftermath of World War II and the occupation of their respective homelands, the arts became a way to both perpetuate their identity in the free world and to explore the predicaments wrought by the condition of exile. Within the diasporas’ literary scenes, the works that touched upon the exilic experience varied from attempts to recapture and preserve lost homelands to contemplations on trauma and displacement.

- Olga Syrova, 21.11.2025

Written Traces of Contact in Medieval Greenland and Sápmi (1000-1550)

Medieval Greenland and the north of Fennoscandia (Sápmi) share a very interesting feature, namely the existence of people who, at least partly, did not become Christians until after the reformation. This is the case even though Christians lived in rather close proximity. Therefore, my research focuses on two main questions: How did the coexistence of Christian and non-Christian groups, namely Saami and Proto-Inuit, look like in the Middle Ages? How where non-Christians perceived, and what influence did these views have on the interaction between them and Christians?

- Olga Syrova, 21.11.2025

From Ideology to Politics – German Occupation of Sámi Everyday Life 1940–45

During the occupation of Norway by the Nazis, Norway was granted a special position in the Nazi regime’s imagined post-war world order, based on a fabricated “Germanic shared destiny”. But how were the Sámi people viewed by Norwegian and German National Socialists within the framework of National Socialist racial ideology? What kind of contact was there between Sámi communities and the German occupying forces during the war, and how were the meetings influenced by this racial ideology?

- Olga Syrova, 21.11.2025

Between Nation, World and Universe: The Philosophy of Home in Nynorsk Literature. 1840-1925.

The motif of heim (the Nynorsk word for home) appears constantly in Nynorsk literature’s beginnings and well into the modern breakthrough. Aside from its definition as a symbol of topographical place, to where one belongs or returns, or from where one departs, heim develops a second meaning that becomes a primary symbol in poetry and prose. It is this second meaning which this thesis argues is paramount to the literature of Nynorsk.

- Olga Syrova, 21.11.2025