Leibniz ScienceCampus 2025 Conference

When?   23–25 April 2025 | Start: 16:00 on 23 April | End: 13:30 on 25 April
Where?  23 April: H 24, Vielberth Building, University of Regensburg, Universitätsstr. 31, 93053 Regensburg
                  24–25 April: Room 319, IOS, Altes Finanzamt, Landshuter Str. 4, 93047 Regensburg
Concept and organization:  Anne Brüske, Cindy Wittke, Rike Krämer-Hoppe, Jochen Mecke, Dagmar Schmelzer and Paul Vickers

Registration | Anmeldung:  Please complete this form by 31 March if you are not part of the conference programme, but would like to attend the opening day, including the reception, on 23 April. Registration to attend on 24-25 April only is not necessary.

Preliminary programme outline below | Keynote lecture on 23 April (16:30) by Liliana Gómez  | Keynote lecture on 24 April (11:00) by Lauri Mälksoo

Conference Abstract

This conference explores translation as a dynamic process shaping cultural, social, and legal exchanges. Beyond linguistic adaptation, translation involves the transformation of meanings, norms, and discourses across different contexts. From avant-garde movements to feminist activism and legal transplants, translation is an interactive and often contested process influenced by power hierarchies and historical legacies. 

Focusing on transregional entanglements - with contributions addressing the Americas, Western, Southern, and Eastern Europe, and Central Asia - the conference brings together scholars from multiple disciplines. The panels will address themes including travelling concepts and knowledge transfer in legal, political and cultural discourses and practices, narrating identities and the struggle for representation, and contestations over artistic movements.  

The keynote speakers will take up these themes, with Liliana Gómez addressing encounters between art, witnesses and civil society in the courtrooms of Balkan and Latin American (post)conflict societies. Lauri Mälksoo will examine role of international treaties in East-West relations, exploring the longer history of treaties involving Russia and European nations. A panel discussion on Area Studies as the Art and Science of Translation provides context for considering the central themes of the conference within an area studies framework. This field is crucial to the research done in Regensburg on the theoretical and empirical dimensions of translation and transfer in an interconnected world marked by frictions and turbulence. 

The event marks the concluding conference of the first funding phase (2019–25) and the opening of the second phase (2024–28) of the ScienceCampus. 

#navigating25

Programme

Wednesday, 23 April 2025

H24, Vielberth Building, University of Regensburg

15:00 Registration

16:00 Welcome Addresses

• Udo Hebel (President of the University of Regensburg)
• Ulf Brunnbauer (Director of the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS), Regensburg)
• Cindy Wittke (IOS) and Anne Brüske (University of Regensburg; Conference co-organizers)

16:30 Keynote 1 | Witnesses in Art: Aesthetics, archives, and (non)institutional practices in transition

• Liliana Gómez (Kassel)

17:30 Award of the 2025 Regensburg Area Studies Prize

• Presented by Ulf Brunnbauer and Anne Brüske

17:50 Short break

18:00 Panel Discussion | Area Studies as the Art and Science of Translation

Chair: Timothy Nunan (Regensburg)

• Marianne Braig (Berlin)
• Jan Hornát (Prague)
• Claudia Kraft (Vienna)
• Sebastian Richter (Regensburg)

19:30 Reception

Thursday, 24 April

Room 319, IOS, Altes Finanzamt, Landshuter Str. 4                 

08:45 Panel 1 | Travelling and Transforming Concepts across Borders and Regions

Chair: Rike Krämer-Hoppe (Regensburg)

• Magdalena Modrzejewska (Krakow) | Translating Anarchisms across Borders: Epistemic shifts and cultural reinterpretations 
• Dagmar Schmelzer (Regensburg) | Navigating Laicity: Processes of cultural negotiation of “French modeled” laïcité  in Québec 
• Artur Simonyan (Berlin / Yerevan)  | When Non-Mainstream Western Scholars Influenced Soviet (International) Law: The case of Alejandro Alvarez and Carl Schmitt 
• Livia Solana Pfuetzenreiter (Paraná)  | The Circulation, Translation and Reception of the Concepts of Administrative Centralization and Decentralization in Nineteenth-century Brazilian and Spanish Doctrines 

10:30 Coffee break

11:00 Keynote 2 | The Concept of Treaty as a Matter of Translation: Russia's historical interactions with the West

• Lauri Mälksoo (Tartu)

12:30 Lunch

13:45 Panel 2 | Dissemination and Transfers of Knowledge

Chair: Jochen Mecke (Regensburg)

• Angela Calderón (Leipzig) | The Literary Truth of the Encyclopedic as a Historical Truth: María Negroni’s La idea natural (2024) 
• Susanne Greilich (Regensburg) | Translating Knowledge about America in the 18th Century: Epistemological and ideological shifts in geographical dictionaries 

14:45 Short coffee break

15:00 Panel 3 | Positioning Ideas and Art: Frictions of the local and global

Chair: Sabine Koller (Regensburg)

• Piotr Słodkowski  (Warsaw) | Who owns Modernism? Polish, Jewish and Ukrainian entanglements in interwar Lviv
• Andrea Gremels (Frankfurt/Oder) | Surrealism’s Global Call against Fascism: Manifestoes in translation

16:00 Coffee break

16:30 Panel 4 | Struggles for and through Representation

Chair: Tatiana Klepikova (Regensburg)

• Lucía Stecher (Santiago de Chile) | Cognitive Schemes, Narrative Schemes, Cultural Translation: Dionne Brand and the revision of the colonial archive 
• Vira Sachenko (Potsdam)  | Intersectional Knowledge, Belonging, and Politics of translation: Between Black feminism and Eastern Europe 
• Laura Luciani (Ghent)  & Elisabed Gedevanishvili (Tbilisi) | Subverting Norms for LGBTQ+ Activism: The “InVisible” Festival and the production of mobile queer spaces in Tbilisi 

18:00 Panel ends

Friday, 25 April 2025

Room 319, IOS, Altes Finanzamt, Landshuter Str. 4    

08:45 Panel 5 | Legal Translations, Transplants and Hierarchies

Chair: Antal Berkes (Liverpool / IOS Visiting Researcher)

• Alexander Graser (Regensburg) | Translation: A useful concept for studying legal transfer?
• Mahsuda Tadjibayeva (Regensburg) | Legal Structures of Influence: The transplantation of Russian trade law and its colonial impact on Central Asia
• Nargiza Ramazonova (Regensburg) | Legal Transplants in Uzbekistan: The interplay of Russian and American legal influences in translating legal norms

10:15 Coffee break

10:45 Panel 6 | Translations of and by Intellectuals

Chair: Mirja Lecke (Regensburg)

• Elisa Kriza (Bamberg) | Interpreting Imperialism and Multipolarity in the Periphery: Mexican intellectuals and the Russian invasion of Ukraine (2022) 
• Jobst Welge (Leipzig) |Travel and Translation in the Work of Sergio Pitol: Cultural transfers between Mexico and Eastern Europe 

11:45 Short coffee break

12:00 Panel 7 | Narratives of Identity in Translation

Chair: Natali Stegmann (Regensburg)

• Halyna Lystvak (Lviv)  and Anita Has-Tokarz  (Lublin) | Translating Books about the Russo-Ukrainian War: Visual storytelling beyond borders 
• Karolina Kluczewska (Bonn)  | A Two-way Translation: International circulation of knowledge about the family in Poland 

13:00 Concluding Discussion

Chair: Anne Brüske (Regensburg) and Cindy Wittke (Regensburg)