Final Report Summary - 28 JUNE 1914 (28 June 1914: A Day in European History and Memory)
This is the original aspect of my work—to illuminate and interrogate the manifold ways the assassination has been conjured and construed since it first entered human consciousness as an event of world historical significance. The project culminates in a broad-based book entitled 28 June 1914: A Day in History and Memory. I completed several chapters of this work during the Marie Curie fellowship, and will publish them for the 2014 centenary (thus I cannot yet specify all these articles under Template A—List of Scientific Publications). They are: “Yugoslav Eulogies” (examines the assassination’s memory in the two Yugoslavias and former Yugoslavia, 1918 to today); “Forgetting Franz Ferdinand” (memory of the Archduke in Austria, 1914 to the present); and “Mental Lapses: The Sandwich that Sabotaged Civilization” (critically examines the inaccuracies, mythologies, and clichés used to evoke Sarajevo, and was the basis for my podcast for Oxford University’s series “New Perspectives on the First World War”). Other chapters explore themes including the varying ways the assassination has been narrated (“History Unleashed”); the historiography of the culpability question (“Writing History: Whodunit, and Why?”); the assassination in film, art, and literature, including literary and scholarly counterfactual accounts (“Manifest Memory: Re-composing the Past”); and the politicization of Sarajevo via, for instance, analogies to contemporary terrorism (“Past Experience”).