Our spring lecture series continues with lectures by Alessandro Stanziani

16.03.2026, 10.00 and 14.00

10.00: Eurocentrism. What is it?

The concept of civilization is often associated with the Enlightenment and, as such, accused of being Eurocentric. Both these terms require to be put into an appropriate conceptual and historical framework; on the one hand, it will be shown that civilization, as emerged during the 18th century, was a complex and controversial notion, which never stopped to evolve over the following centuries in response to several and multiple processes: globalizations,  the confrontation between national, imperial, post-imperial spaces and values, the overlapping of integration and confrontation in these multiple spaces. Nowadays, eurocentrism often confuses the subject and the object (is it related to Europe or the West, both complicated to define; does it refer to what some historical actors in these areas referred in the past or just to the study of an European area nowadays). As such, eurocentrism risks to be an empty shell with no explanatory power, a kind of normative notion related unable to explain why and in which context integration vs confrontation has emerged.

14.00: Historical Artefacts. A Social History

This lecture explores the construction of archives and historical memory, the making of statistics and their use in politics, the identification of social actors, and the emergence of key social theories. Providing key insights into how to write history and develop social sciences in the global era while avoiding eurocentrism and cultural exceptionalism-

Venue: ELTE BTK, Budapest, Múzeum krt. 6-8. / 247