On 20-21 March 2015, Professor Richard BUTTERWICK-PAWLIKOWSKI, Chairholder of the EP Geremek Chair of European Civilization at the Natolin (Warsaw) campus of the College of Europe, organized and hosted a conference on "Microhistories: Social and Cultural Relations in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (1387-1795)" at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London.
The conference was organized jointly by SSEES and the Lithuanian Institute of History, Vilnius, and sponsored by the Lithuanian and Polish Embassies, Barclays Bank, Vilnius University, the Patron of the Anglo-Belarusian Society, the British-Lithuanian Society and the Association of Belarusians in Great Britain. The ambassadors of Lithuania and Poland to the UK were present at the opening.
Eighteen papers were delivered by historians and literary historians from Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, the USA and the UK. Instead of rehearsing national metanarratives about the contested "inheritance rights" to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, participants explored and discussed diverse relationships within and between the religious, socio-economic, political and cultural communities of the Grand Duchy on the basis of newly discovered or underexploited primary sources. Topics ranged from property law to patronage, from migration to medicine, and from charitable care to chroniclers’ allegations of cannibalism. A leitmotiv was visualization and narration through maps.
The keynote lecture, on early modern urban history, was delivered by Professor David FRICK of the University of California at Berkeley. Professor BUTTERWICK-PAWLIKOWSKI’s own paper was on "Propaganda in the Parishes: Local Communication during the Insurrection of 1794".