Centre for the Study of Global Nationalisms (CSGN)

The concept of the nation, historically crucial for defining the structure of the modern world and its prevailing identities, continues to be indispensable in articulating and understanding politics, society and culture. Part of our research deals with the historical role of the nation as a unifying and potentially emancipatory frame, subverting other orders and being subverted by them. While scholars in the 1990s expected the dusk of the nation, events of the 21st century have demonstrated how national ideas resist transnational Globalization, Europeanization and Cosmopolitanism, all of which are now under continuing challenge. Instead of declining in importance, the nation has become the mobilizing element in new, resurgent or reinvented illiberal ideologies, discourses and political practices and movements. Invoking the nation is now standard rhetoric used to erode or openly attack established liberal democracies, with dramatic implications for the European political landscape and for the global order as well. 

One of our focus areas (see projects below) is the Global so-called "New Right". As such we understand illiberal ideologies, movements and politics which are on the rise – not only in Europe and the United States but also in Russia, Latin America and South Asia, among other places. The world has not experienced similar growth since the 1930s, as Enzo Traverso remarks in his famous book on Postfascism. We try to go beyond established explanatory concepts like populism, authoritarianism and xenophobic identitarianism by paying special attention to often overlooked antimodern and de-secularizing tendencies.

CSGN's commitment is to contribute, through research and outreach, to a better understanding of global nationalisms and their roots in the past, across languages and regions. Hosted by the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies and advised by an international Steering Committee (see below), the Centre is designed as an interdisciplinary hub for scholars working on nationalisms at the University of Copenhagen and other Danish universities and research institutions, together with partners abroad.

• Associate Professor Georg Walter Wink, Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies (director)
• Associate Professor Jørn Boisen, Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies (Co-coordinator).
• Associate Professor Anna Lena Sandberg, Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies
• Associate Professor Mogens Pelt, Saxo Institute
• Professor Rasmus Glenthøj, University of Southern Denmark
• Postdoc Nicolaj von Eggers Mariegaard, Aarhus University
• Professor Gabriella Elgenius, University of Gothenburg
• Senior Researcher Joana-Isabel Duyster Borreda, University of Heidelberg, Stiftung Ebert Gedenkstätte