CFP: Naša sloga (1870 – 2020)

Deadline: February 29, 2020

Faculty of Humanitiesof the Juraj Dobrila University of Pula (Croatia)

On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the newspaper Naša sloga, the Department of Croatian and the Department of History of the Faculty of Humanities of the Juraj Dobrila University of Pula will organize a scientific conference. The event will take place at the Faculty of Humanities in Pula from June  12 to June 13, 2020.

The year 2020 will mark the 150th anniversary of the founding of the newspaper Naša sloga, the most important revival paper for Istrian Croats. When in 1870 a group of revivalists, who were gathered around bishop Juraj Dobrila, decided to start a paper intended for Istrian Croats, they were fully aware of the fact that their project will be a demanding job with an uncertain outcome. The support of Josip Juraj Strossmayer, the bishop of Đakovo, and a modest number of possible collaborators scattered around the Margravate of Istria, who were mostly members of the rural clergy, could not be considered a guarantee for success of the enterprise. However, the result surpassed the expectations of its founders.

Written and edited with the intention of bringing political and national topics closer to the modestly educated readership, during the period of nearly half a century of its publication (1870 - 1915), Naša sloga did not only record the process of strengthening the Croatian nation in Istria, but also contributed to it. At the same time, as the first gazette in Croatian, it opposed the influence of Italian language and culture. This makes Naša sloga particularly important for the development of the Croatian language and Croatian journalism in Istria.

The aim of the international scientific conference on the occasion of the 150th anniversary is to highlight the historical, linguistic, literary and cultural significance of Naša sloga, through presentations dedicated to the newspaper itself and other related issues in the Croatian and Habsburg context. For example, the support provided by bishop Strossmayer is a clear link with other activities that this church dignitary was endorsing or launching within the Croatian and South Slavic area. Similarly, the newsletter should be considered in the context of the important social role that the clergy had among broad layers of population throughout the Habsburg Monarchy and Central Europe. Finally, the process of building a modern national consciousness with a prominent link to the process of strengthening the importance of one's own language and written culture is not something that separates, but connects contemporaneous Istrian circumstances to the context of integration of Croatian nation on the edges, i.e. in contact with, and sometimes in conflict with the neighbouring nations. The aforementioned process is also recognizable in other multinational and multilingual regions of the Monarchy, both geographically close and distant ones. The invitation is therefore addressed to Croatian and foreign researchers, historians and Croatian language scholars, as well as other interested experts, who will consider topics in one of the given subject areas.

Subject areas
 

• Naša sloga (1870 - 1915)
• Formation of Croatian nation in contact with neighbouring cultures and languages
• Reflections of world/Habsburg/national circumstances in provincial gazettes
• National mobilization in multinational provinces of the Habsburg Monarchy
• The construction of national identity and written culture
• The language of old newspapers
• Literature and old newspapers
• Journalism then and now
• The reflection of living conditions in the articles of provincial newsletters
   

Application

To participate in the conference send the filled form by February 29, 2020 to the email address: ffpu-nasa-sloga@unipu.hr or to the postal address: Faculty of Philosophy in Pula, I.M. Ronjgova 1, HR-52100 Pula with the note: Naša sloga (1870 - 2020). To access the application form, please click here. 

The notification of (non)acceptance of the abstract will be sent to the authors' email addresses by  March 15, 2020. All accepted abstracts will be published in the Book of abstracts.

Complete papers from the conference will be published in the Conference Proceedings after the standard procedure of scientific assessment.

The deadline for submitting papers is October 1, 2020. Participation at this conference is free of charge.The official languages of the conference are Croatian, English and Italian.
 

Organizational committee
Mihovil Dabo, Teodora Fonović Cvijanović, Nevio Šetić, Vanessa Vitković Marčeta

Program Committee

Antoni Cetnarowicz (Krakow), Mihovil Dabo (Pula), Teodora Fonović Cvijanović (Pula), Angela Ilić (München), Nevio Šetić (Pula), Vanessa Vitković Marčeta (Pula), Salvator Žitko (Portorož)