TRANSREGIONS · The emergence of transregional networks in Europe (1886-1936)

European regionalisms did not emerge in isolation. Quite the contrary: the affirmation of regional identities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – e.g., in Catalonia, Galicia, Occitania, Brittany, Wallonia and Flanders – involved a striking intensification of transfers in the fields of art and literature. Yet these transregional dynamics have largely been ignored by cultural historians and relegated to the footnotes of transnational history. TRANSREGIONS pursues three goals: (1) to lay bare the emergence of transregional networks by following their key mediators and retracing inter-peripheral transfer activities at different phases of regional identity building, (2) to offer a reproducible model for the study of cultural emergence and multiscale cross-border phenomena, and (3) to set the first decisive steps toward the writing of an entangled history of European regional movements, offering an alternative and decentralized perspective that highlights the role of minorized cultures and agents against dominant, national and monolingual historiographical models. These goals will be achieved with an innovative gender-inclusive, agent- and process- oriented method, involving the use of new digital tools, that will be applied to a hitherto unexplored corpus of journals. The interdisciplinary combination of data mining, social network analysis and complexity theory will highlight unexpected cultural practices and connections and bring new insights to the fields of regionalism studies, global history and translation studies. At a wider societal level, TRANSREGIONS will provide food for thought in the context of the current push for regionalization challenging the Europe of Nations. From a personal perspective, this MSCA-IF will significantly contribute to my development as a strong, versatile and independent researcher in the fields of translation studies and global cultural history.