Exhibiting the Nation:
World's Fairs, International Exhibitions,
and the Place of Southeastern
and East Central Europe

The University of Texas at Austin
October 26 - 27, 2007

Organizers

Mary Neuburger
Department of History
Christopher Long
School of Architecture

This symposium will explore the history of staging Worlds' Fairs and other significant national exhibitions within Southeastern and East Central Europe, and participation of these various countries in exhibitions outside the region, most notably in the West. It will examine a wide array of questions. To what extent, for example, was Balkan (or East European) backwardness on display and how was it situated within host-country organizations of meaning? Did Balkan peoples perhaps exoticize their own nations in order to sell their wares to consuming Western publics? Or did East Europeans use these fairs as vehicles for exhibiting an image of their own bourgeoning progress and material prosperity to the world? How did East Europeans generate or reproduce national meanings at home through the vehicle of the world's fair or national exhibition? What architectural and design forms or other kinds of displays and messages were utilized in creating spaces for the making of a modern citizenry? Such questions raise issues not only about the power implications of Western representations of "other" peoples, but also about how East Europeans and others were able to "read" these fairs and as a consequence shape their own national participation and display. The situating of the Balkans within the East-West continuum was and continues to be integral to the Southeastern European national projects. World's Fairs and national exhibitions present an exceptional context for exploration of the South Eastern European encounter with the rest of Europe and the "West," both at home and abroad.

Schedule of Events

Download the Exhibiting the Nation Schedule of Events [pdf].

Participants

• Mary Neuburger
  Department of History, University of Texas at Austin
  "Fair Encounters: Bulgaria and the "West" at International Exhibitions from Plovdiv (1892) to Chicago (1893) to St. Louis (1904)"
• Sarah A. Kent
  Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point
  "The 1891 Agricultural and Forestry Jubilee Exhibition in Zagreb"
• Rachel Rossner
  Department of Art History, University of Chicago
  "The Culmination of a Dream: The Exhibition of Croatian Art at the 1896 Exhibition in Budapest"
• Emily Gunzburger Makaš
  Department of Architecture, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
  "The Bosnian Pavilion at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle"
• Aleksandra Ðajić Horvath
  Department of History and Civilization, European University Institute
  "Musée Ethnographique Serbe: Serbian Participation at the Exposition Universelle de Paris 1900"
• Nicolae Harsanyi
  The Wolfsonian Library, Florida International University
  "Romania at the pre-World War II World Fairs"
• Rebecca Houze
  Department of Art History, Northern Illinois University
  "Austrian, Hungarian or Romanian? Embroidery and Empire at the 1873 Wiener Weltausstellung"
• Eric Anderson
  Department of Art History, Columbia University
  "Transylvanian Villages to Viennese Salons: Culture on Display at the 1873 World's Fair"
• Hanna Murauskaya
  Department of History, Université Paris-1 Panthéon Sorbonne
  "Kronprinzenwerk - An Exemplary Imperial Exhibition?"
• Michael W. Dean
  Department of History , University of California, Berkeley
  "Džán Kudla at the Fair: The American Settlement at the Czechoslav Ethnographic Exposition of 1895"
• Dorothy Barenscott
  Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, University of British Columbia
  "Articulating Identity Through the Technological Re-Articulation of Space at the 1896 Budapest Millennial Exhibition"
• Cathleen M. Giustino
  Department of History, Auburn University
  "The 1902 Rodin Exhibition in Prague: The Early Czech Avant-Garde and Possibilities for Escape from Nineteenth-Century Ethno-National Hierarchies"
• Christopher Long
  School of Architecture, University of Texas at Austin
  "Modernism and National Identity: The Austrian Pavilion at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase International Exposition in St. Louis"
• Zachary Doleshal
  Department of History, University of Texas at Austin
  "Imagining Czechoslovakia in the World of Tomorrow: The Czechoslovak Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair"
• Vladimir Kulić
  School of Architecture, University of Texas at Austin
  "The Pavilion of Yugoslavia at the EXPO '58 in Brussels"