The professional cooperation between the historians of these two universities dates back to more than a decade ago and has developed through participation in international conferences, personal contacts and joint publications, chiefly among historians researching the Middle Ages.
Last Friday's workshop extended this existing network of contacts by including colleagues whose field is the modern age.
“The first group to establish professional relations with Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń was the institutes' medieval historians, a key figure of which is our university's honorary doctor, Professor Roman Czaja, a renowned medieval historian. It was he who, at the very first meeting, raised the possibility of expanding our cooperation by involving the fields of modern and recent history. The first and most important step in this direction is the current symposium,” said Róbert Barta to hirek.unideb.hu about the background of the conference.
The director of the Institute of History of the Faculty of Humanities at UD underlined that he always considers it important to cultivate both personal and professional relations, which are stimulating for both parties from an academic point of view. The reason for this is simply that, in addition to getting to know each other's research findings and achievements, the participants’ publications can also come out internationally.
At the symposium, a presentation was given by Dorota Michaluk, Professor of the Department of Military History at the University of Toruń, who is an excellent expert on Lithuanian and Belarusian history, focusing on the exciting period of Belarusian history between 1915 and 1919, which is rather slightly known in our country. She highlighted the fact that Polish-Hungarian relations look back on a long history, which has to be maintained at the academic level even today. The way to achieve this is through mutual knowledge of each other's academic activities, for which personal contacts are essential, and it is planned to expand these in the future, not only by hosting next year's conference, but also by means of mobility, especially student mobility, in addition to the one already available for the teaching staff.
Among the Polish speakers, Professor Krzysztof Kania gave an insight into the last period of the Polish communist regime based on the correspondence of the leading figures of the Polish emigres after 1945. Katalin Schrek, Assistant Professor at the Institute of History of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Debrecen, presented a topic from the Balkans, which is part of the research project she is currently heading, while Professor Csaba Lévai gave a talk on an aspect of his field of research, which was about the reception of the first phase of American history under the Kádár regime.
The papers delivered at the symposium will be published in English later this year in the latest volume of the yearbook of the Institute of History, titled Historical Studies.
The next Modern History Symposium will be hosted by Copernicus University in Torun in the spring of 2026.
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