Paul Richard Milliman

During the fourteenth century social memories of an earlier borderland society in Poland were buried under created memories of “bordered lands,” in which hardened political and cultural identities began to coincide with rigidly defined secular and ecclesiastical boundaries. My dissertation examines how and why these new historical traditions were constructed and accepted and what this can teach us about the construction of group identity today. As Europe enters what some scholars call a “new middle ages” in which supranational and transnational institutions again compete with the nation-state’s role in governance and collective identity formation, I hope my research can help to open new avenues of inquiry into the current processes of European integration.

"The Trials of the Teutonic Order State with its Neighbors in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries: Political Thought and its Centers of Formation," Institute of History and Archival Sciences, Uniwersytet Mikolaja Kopernika, Torun and Zamek Bierzglowski, Poland, organized by Wieslaw Sieradzan and Aleksandra Lenartowicz.