Date: 24 April 2026; 10-15:00
Location: Tampere University, Virta -building (Åkerlundinkatu 5), auditorium 109 & Linna -building, auditorium 4013
Organisers: Natalya Bekhta, Karolina Bagdonė and Svetozara Bozhilova
Welcome to the next research workshop in the project “Utopia and Eastern European Literature after 1989”! In this two-part interdisciplinary workshop we shall focus on the question, how the East of Europe imagines the future, in literary, cultural and political terms.
We are excited to host Zsolt Czigányik (Budapest), Jaak Tomberg (Tartu) and Henri Vogt (Turku) as guest speakers and discussants in the workshop. The first workshop session will be structured as a series of presentations, embedded into the programme of the international symposium “Future Narratives across Media.” The second session will follow after lunch and focus on the remaining questions and hypotheses of futural utopias, their relationship to nation studies, utopias in Western and Central Europe, and the major political and cultural transformations in post-Soviet Europe, drawing on the work-in-progress papers circulated in advance.
No registration is needed for participation but please get in touch with the organisers to receive the workshop reading materials. Please also note the change of location for the afternoon session.
PROGRAMME
Session 1 10.15–11.45
Virta -building (Åkerlundinkatu 5), auditorium 109
Zsolt Czigányik Utopia and the nation
Jaak Tomberg The End of History at the Beginning of History
Natalya Bekhta Narrating utopia
Discussant: Henri Vogt
Session 2 13.00-15.00
Linna -building (Kalevantie 5), auditorium 4013
Discussion of work-in-progress papers and open questions
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Zsolt Czigányik (b. 1974) is Associate Professor in the Department of English Studies at ELTE University, Budapest, and is the secretary of the Utopian Studies Society / Europe. He was a Gerda Henkel Fellow at Central European University’s Democracy Institute. His research interests include utopian and dystopian literature (both Western and Central European), and the study of utopia from literary and social science perspectives, and contemporary literature. His publications include Utopia Between East and West in Hungarian Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) and Utopia and Democracy (2025), a volume he edited with Iva Dimovska.
Jaak Tomberg (b. 1980) is Associate Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Tartu, Estonia, whose main areas of research are philosophy of literature, poetics, science fiction, literary utopias and the utopian imagination. His most recent book, „Kuidas täita soovi” (How to Fulfil a Wish; 2023) is on the fate and status of realism, science fiction, and the utopian imagination in a technologically saturated, globalized cultural reality. Besides academic research, Tomberg has written a lot of award-winning literary criticism, edited the Estonian experimental avant-garde journal VIHIK, translated fiction, and written plays. In 2014, he was awarded the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pioneer Award for the best essay-length article of the year.
Henri Vogt has been Professor of International Politics at the University of Turku, Finland, since 2010. He holds a D.Phil. in politics from St Antony’s College, Oxford, and an M.Soc.Sc. in political science from the University of Helsinki. One of the long-term focusses of his research has been the challenges of democracy and democratic consolidation in Europe, with “utopia” as one of the primary analytical angles employed (e.g. the monograph on postcommunist political transformation “Between Utopia and Disillusionment“, 2005). In recent years his scholarly output has primarily dealt with European polycrisis politics – in many respects an antithesis of “utopia”.