Workshop & 5th Core Group Meeting

5^th Core Group meeting, Prague, May 6^th – 10^th 2009

 The first two days of the meeting were dedicated to the interaction with the local and wider Central European scholarly community. In the first day, we discussed various aspects of our project with  experts on the Czech intellectual history and history of ideas: Miroslav Hroch, Jeremy King and Avi Tucker. The second day, we attended the conference on the Reconstruction of National History and State Building after Communism, organized by the Czech Institute of Contemporary History with the support of the International Visegrad Fund. The last three days were devoted to the core group meeting proper, to which we included four external experts: Nevenko Bartulin, Augusta Dimou, Andrej Findor, and Lea Ypi.

In the meeting we agreed on the following:

• By the end of June, the general sketch of the primary literature should be finalized. In the following weeks, the representatives of national and regional contexts shall give exact recommendations (including chapters and pages) of primary readings for the top thinkers, while distribute all the others into the bibliographic meta-categories.
• By the end of May, a top list of 20 secondary works on the history of political thought, intellectual history and history of ideas shall be compiled for each national context, while speeding up the building of the website bibliography.  
• Each of us should continue writing a sketch (with an implied narrative) of the history of political thought of our own national/regional context, with particular attention to texts that were framing the contemporary discourse (economic, legal texts, etc.), but which have fallen out of the national canon. We will discuss the sketches in early 2010. We should also continue compiling the list of influential foreign thinkers for our context. By the next meeting, we will finalize the list of characteristic quotes and key notions from our national contexts to integrate into the chapter sketches.
• We will try to find suitable experts to cover Belarus and Ukraine, as well as experts on the broader regional history and additional members of the Advisory Board.
• The next meeting will be held in Belgrade in mid September, with a focus on the fin-de-siècle, interwar, and post-1945 periods. The post-1989 period will be discussed with the local experts. By summer, we will finalize an exact list of open issues to be discussed with the single experts. The following meetings will take place in Amsterdam in late November, with the focus on the 19^th century, Sofia (spring 2010), Bucharest (June 2010), and Warsaw (September 2010).

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