Theme : Memory Studies, Public History Date: November 29th-December 1st 2024 Place: Thessaloniki, Greece The Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies, University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, the Department of History, Faculty of Law and History, South-West University “Neofit Rilski”, Blagoevgrad, the History Laboratory of the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies, University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, and the Balkan History Association are organizing an international conference on November 29th-Decemeber 1st 2024 in Thessaloniki, Greece, with the subject “Common past—divided memories”. The conference is addressed to all academics, including young scholars. Abstracts no longer than 300 words, along with contact information, name, and institutional affiliation, should be sent to commonpast-memories@uom.edu.gr (conference secretary). The deadline for abstract submission is 15 July 2024, and the full list of speakers will be announced in the end of July 2024. For more information  https://www.memoryconference2024.uom.gr/ . Aims and subjects Undoubtedly the common patterns of Modern and Contemporary History of Eastern and Southeastern Europe were formed by the contradictions of the legacy of the Enlightenment, whose ideas of the universal character of human spirit and historical progress inspired cultural emancipation, national revivals, and political revolutions, the birth of modernity and nationalism, and social and technological progress, but these ended in the world wars that brought about the fall of multinational empires and the rise of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes and casted a shadow over the ideals of human reason and its critical power. In its turn, the ensuing pivotal developments in the last decades, the fall of Communism, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and of the Warsaw Pact, marked in a specific way our perception and apprehension of the common past and different national destinies within it. There should be no doubt that our understanding of all these common processes and different experiences, which embrace a very large scale of political, economic, and cultural changes, transformations, transitions, and radical shifts as well as their contrasting or familiar significance for states, societies, and individuals, have been instrumental in different policies from above and below, and shaped by official and non-official institutions, structures and agents, in public and private. Memory studies, concerned with analysing all these phenomena and revealing the sources for the emancipation of marginal groups and political minorities by approaching the context in which the common collective and separate individual choices have been made, already have a long pedigree. The recent paradigm turns...