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Larry Wolff will speak about his new book about the Greek Catholic Church: Disunion within the Union: The Uniate Church and the Partitions of Poland, which was recently published by HURI.
YouTube stream: https://youtu.be/YY8-oJlz-zI
The book discusses how the Greek Catholic Church responded to the exceptionally difficult political circumstances created by the partitions of Poland which involved subjecting a large part of the Uniate population to the rule of Russia under Catherine II. During the lecture, Wolff will speak about his own academic involvement with this subject in the context of Ukrainian studies and Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute, and about his understanding of the strategic challenges of survival for the Uniate Church, created in early modern Europe at the end of the sixteenth century, and adapting to the advent of modern social and political circumstances at the end of the eighteenth century.
Larry Wolff works on the history of Eastern Europe, the Habsburg Monarchy, the Enlightenment, and on the history of childhood. He has been most interested in problems concerning East and West within Europe: whether concerning the Vatican and Poland, Venice and the Slavs, or Vienna and Galicia. In the book Inventing Eastern Europe (1994) he developed the argument that Eastern Europe was "invented" in the eighteenth century by the philosophes and travelers of the Enlightenment, who attributed meaning to a supposed division of Europe into complementary regions: Western Europe and Eastern Europe. Wolff has analyzed Western perspectives on Eastern Europe as a sort of "demi-Orientalism," negotiating a balance between attributed difference and acknowledged resemblance. In books about Venetian perspectives on Dalmatia (Venice and the Slavs, 2001) and Habsburg perspectives on Galicia (The Idea of Galicia, 2010), he has attempted to explore the meaning of "Eastern Europe" within imperial frameworks and the ideology of empire. His research also addresses the the history of child abuse, Turkish subjects, and music, particularly opera.